Question

Is it possible to delete the first record from a table in SQL Server, without using any WHERE condition and without using a cursor?

Answer 1

WITH  q AS         (         SELECT TOP 1 *         FROM    mytable         /* You may want to add ORDER BY here */         ) DELETE FROM    q 

Note that

DELETE TOP (1) FROM   mytable 

will also work, but, as stated in the documentation:

The rows referenced in the TOP expression used with INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE are not arranged in any order.

Therefore, it’s better to use WITH and an ORDER BY clause, which will let you specify more exactly which row you consider to be the first.