Question

I am trying to delete the all but the most recent 3,000 items in a table. The table has 105,000 records.

I am trying this, but an error is generated incorrect syntax.

delete tRealtyTrac where creation in( select top 103000 from tRealtyTrac order by creation)

Answer 1

The delete syntax is going to be slightly different from what you have. An example would be:

DELETE FROM tRealtyTrac
WHERE creation in( select top 103000 creation from tRealtyTrac order by creation)

Notice how there is the “from” keyword. This is saying we want to delete from the table called tRealtyTrac

The one problem I foresee with this is, you are probably going to want to not use creation…

Instead:

DELETE FROM tRealtyTrac
WHERE someuniqueidcolumnlikeakeyofsomesort in( select top 103000 someuniqueidcolumnlikeakeyofsomesort from tRealtyTrac order by creation)

Otherwise you may delete more than you intended.