Deleting data

Now that we have some data in our database, we can look at how we can delete specific documents. As usual, the query is very straightforward. The first thing to do is select the document to be deleted. This can be done using the document's primary key or using the filter() command. The next step is chaining the delete() command at the end of the query.

As an example, let's delete Ted's document from the people table:

r.table('people').filter({"name": "Ted"}).delete()

First, we select the correct table, then we use the filter() command to specify the predicate. In this case, we filter documents that have the name attribute equal to Ted. Finally, we call the delete() command. The resulting JSON indicates that one document has indeed been removed:

{
"deleted": 1 ,
"errors": 0 ,
"inserted": 0 ,
"replaced": 0 ,
"skipped": 0 ,
"unchanged": 0
}

Removing all documents

Occasionally, we may want to clear the entire table by removing all the documents contained in it. As in the previous section...