Cosmos DB - Deleting a document

azure azure-cosmosdb
Ben Mayo picture Ben Mayo · Oct 22, 2017 · Viewed 30.6k times · Source

How can I delete an individual record from Cosmos DB?

I can select using SQL syntax:

SELECT *
FROM collection1
WHERE (collection1._ts > 0)

And sure enough all documents (analogous to rows?) are returned

However this doesn't work when I attempt to delete

DELETE
FROM collection1
WHERE (collection1._ts > 0)

How do I achieve that?

Answer

David Makogon picture David Makogon · Oct 22, 2017

The DocumentDB API's SQL is specifically for querying. That is, it only provides SELECT, not UPDATE or DELETE.

Those operations are fully supported, but require REST (or SDK) calls. For example, with .net, you'd call DeleteDocumentAsync() or ReplaceDocumentAsync(), and in node.js, this would be a call to deleteDocument() or replaceDocument().

In your particular scenario, you could run your SELECT to identify documents for deletion, then make "delete" calls, one per document (or, for efficiency and transactionality, pass an array of documents to delete, into a stored procedure).

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