sqlDrop {RODBC}

Deletion Operations on Tables in ODBC databases

Description

sqlClear deletes all the rows of the table sqtable.

sqlDrop removes the table sqtable (if permitted).

Usage

sqlClear(channel, sqtable, errors = TRUE)

sqlDrop(channel, sqtable, errors = TRUE)

Arguments

channel

connection object as returned by odbcConnect.

sqtable

character string: a database table name accessible from the connected DSN. This can be a ‘dotted’ name of the form schema.table.

errors

logical: if TRUE halt and display error, else return -1.

Details

These submit ‘⁠TRUNCATE TABLE⁠’ and ‘⁠DROP TABLE⁠’ SQL queries respectively.

‘Dotted’ table names are allowed on systems that support them but the existence of the table is not checked and so attempting these operations on a non-existent table will give a low-level error. (This can be suppressed by opening the connection with interpretDot = FALSE.)

The default ‘drop’ behaviour in Oracle is to move the table to the ‘recycle bin’: use

  sqlQuery(channel, "PURGE recyclebin")

to empty the recycle bin.

The current user might not have privileges to allow these operations, and Actual Technologies' Mac OS X SQLite driver has a bug causing them silently to fail.

Value

If errors = FALSE, a numeric value, invisibly. Otherwise a character string or invisible().

Author(s)

Michael Lapsley and Brian Ripley

See Also

odbcConnect, sqlQuery, sqlFetch, sqlSave, sqlTables, odbcGetInfo