Is it possible to delete from multiple tables in the same SQL statement?

Question

It's possible to delete using join statements to qualify the set to be deleted, such as the following:

DELETE J
FROM Users U
inner join LinkingTable J on U.id = J.U_id
inner join Groups G on J.G_id = G.id

WHERE G.Name = 'Whatever'
and U.Name not in ('Exclude list')

However I'm interested in deleting both sides of the join criteria -- both the LinkingTable record and the User record on which it depends. I can't turn cascades on because my solution is Entity Framework code first and the bidirectional relationships make for multiple cascade paths.

Ideally, I'd like something like:

DELETE J, U
FROM Users U
inner join LinkingTable J on U.id = J.U_id
...

Syntactically this doesn't work out, but I'm curious if something like this is possible?

Answer 1

Nope, you'd need to run multiple statements.

Because you need to delete from two tables, consider creating a temp table of the matching ids:

SELECT U.Id INTO #RecordsToDelete
FROM Users U
   JOIN LinkingTable J ON U.Id = J.U_Id
...

And then delete from each of the tables:

DELETE FROM Users 
WHERE Id IN (SELECT Id FROM #RecordsToDelete)

DELETE FROM LinkingTable
WHERE Id IN (SELECT Id FROM #RecordsToDelete)