Question

Let us presume that we have a table which’s rows are identified only by their position, and have no other particular differences (as a primary key, an id, a timestamp, etc) and
as MySQL ‘DELETE’ syntax does not allow LIMIT how does one succeed in deleting a row in such a table.

Like:

DELETE FROM `table` LIMIT 49,1

As it is possible to:

SELECT * FROM `table` LIMIT 49,1

I thank you in advance for your kindness to help with an answer.

Answer 1

This is not a useful feature, because the order of rows in the table is not guaranteed. Under load, a table will invariably come out in a different order due to the behaviour of MySQL.

You might try the following but as stated above, it’s not guaranteed to be accurate

DELETE FROM `table` 
     WHERE `col1` IN (SELECT `col1` FROM `table` LIMIT 49,1) 
        AND `col2` IN (SELECT `col2` FROM `table` LIMIT 49,1) 
        AND ...
     LIMIT 1;