Question

I have a table MRU, that has 3 columns.

(VALUE varchar(255); TYPE varchar(20); DT_ADD datetime)

This is a table simply storing an entry and recording the date time it was recorded. What I wanted to do is: delete the oldest entry whenever I add a new entry that exceeds a certain number.

Here is my query:

delete from MRU 
where type = 'FILENAME' 
ORDER BY DT_ADD limit 1;

The error message is:
SQL Error: near “ORDER”: syntax error …

The query returns an error.

Answer 1

I’m not saying that you should do so, since it’s completely non-portable, but if there’s a compelling need, this will work:

In SQLite the rowid column always exists unless an integer primary key is defined elsewhere. This can be used in something like:

delete from MRU where rowid = (
    select rowid from MRU order by DT_ADD limit 1
)