Deleting rows from a Delta Lake table

This section explains how to delete rows from a Delta Lake table.

Suppose you have the following Delta table with four rows:

+-------+----------+
|   num | letter   |
|-------+----------|
|     1 | a        |
|     2 | b        |
|     3 | c        |
|     4 | d        |
+-------+----------+

Here's how to delete all the rows where the num is greater than 2:

PythonRust

dt = DeltaTable("tmp/my-table")
dt.delete("num > 2")

let table = deltalake::open_table("./data/simple_table").await?;
let (table, delete_metrics) = DeltaOps(table)
    .delete()
    .with_predicate(col("num").gt(lit(2)))
    .await?;

with_predicate expects an argument that can be translated to a Datafusion Expression. This can be either using the Dataframe API, or using a SQL where clause:

let table = deltalake::open_table("./data/simple_table").await?;
let (table, delete_metrics) = DeltaOps(table)
    .delete()
    .with_predicate("num > 2")
    .await?;

Here are the contents of the Delta table after the delete operation has been performed:

+-------+----------+
|   num | letter   |
|-------+----------|
|     1 | a        |
|     2 | b        |
+-------+----------+

dt.delete() accepts any SQL where clause. If no predicate is provided, all rows will be deleted.