MySQL Empty Database / Delete or Drop All Tables

last updated November 13, 2008 in AIX, CentOS, Debian / Ubuntu, FreeBSD, Linux, MySQL, OpenBSD, RedHat and Friends, Solaris-Unix, Suse, Ubuntu Linux, UNIX

Q. How do I empty MySQL database? What SQL command needs to be executed in order to delete all (100s) of tables in MySQL database called atomstore?

A. You need to use DROP DATABASE sql command to drops all tables in the database/empty database and deletes the database. Be very careful with this statement! To use DROP DATABASE, you need the DROP privilege on the database

MySQL drop all tables syntax:

DROP DATABASE {mysql-database-name}

Method #1: Empty database with root user

In order to use this procedure you must have the drop and create database privilege (otherwise you will drop database but not able to create it again). Login as MySQL root or admin user to drop atomstore database:
$ mysql -u root -p
Now drop database:
mysql> DROP DATABASE atomstore;
Now create database again:
mysql> CREATE DATABASE atomstore;
Exit and close the session:
mysql> quit

Method #2: Drop all tables using shell script w/o root access

I’ve small handy shell script that removes all tables without dropping and creating MySQL database again.

#!/bin/bash
MUSER="$1"
MPASS="$2"
MDB="$3"
 
# Detect paths
MYSQL=$(which mysql)
AWK=$(which awk)
GREP=$(which grep)
 
if [ $# -ne 3 ]
then
	echo "Usage: $0 {MySQL-User-Name} {MySQL-User-Password} {MySQL-Database-Name}"
	echo "Drops all tables from a MySQL"
	exit 1
fi
 
TABLES=$($MYSQL -u $MUSER -p$MPASS $MDB -e 'show tables' | $AWK '{ print $1}' | $GREP -v '^Tables' )
 
for t in $TABLES
do
	echo "Deleting $t table from $MDB database..."
	$MYSQL -u $MUSER -p$MPASS $MDB -e "drop table $t"
done

Simply use above script as follows to empty a database called quiz with username tom and password jerry:
$ ./drop.table.sh tom jerry quiz

Download MySQL empty database drop script

You can download complete script with error checking below:

MySQL Drop All Tables Shell Script Utility

Posted by: Vivek Gite

The author is the creator of nixCraft and a seasoned sysadmin, DevOps engineer, and a trainer for the Linux operating system/Unix shell scripting. Get the latest tutorials on SysAdmin, Linux/Unix and open source topics via RSS/XML feed or weekly email newsletter.

51 comment

Jon says:
March 11, 2008 at 10:25 am
Alternative methods:
In PHPMyAdmin, you can check all tables and then choose with selected: drop.
If you are doing it with scripting, You can use SHOW TABLES to list the tables, and use this to generate a query DROP TABLE [tablename],[tablename]…
romina says:
May 16, 2008 at 8:41 pm
You can have the drop privilege, but not the create database one!!
BE CAREFUL WHEN DOING THIS! You might end up with no DB at all.
Please don’t suggest this kind of procedures without explaining the whole nine yards.
Colin says:
July 1, 2008 at 3:22 pm
Unfortunately this is no use if you don’t have permissions for create database (like the situation i am currently in).
google pagerank says:
August 29, 2008 at 6:41 am
Really informative post..thanks..:)
Mas says:
February 2, 2009 at 12:14 am
Great post and you do not need create database privileges for this. The method is only dropping the tables and not the database. The user should have create tables under the database..
Thanks
OnkelBeh says:
March 11, 2009 at 12:10 pm
What about :
mysqldump -u[user] -p[ssht...] --add-drop-table --no-data [DATABASE] | grep ^DROP | mysql -u[user] -p[sshht...] [DATABASE]
1. sergeysynergy says:
  February 28, 2013 at 9:57 am
  Worked purfect 4 me, tnx. What a clean and tidy script.
2. fritig says:
  March 9, 2014 at 6:10 pm
  YES it works, I was searching for that since 24 HOURS ! Thank you very much
3. Marco Cacchiani says:
  June 22, 2015 at 1:24 pm
  GENIUS … this is the word!
  Thank you (even with 6 years delay!)
ddb says:
May 14, 2009 at 5:20 am
You can use also:
mysql> use database;
mysql> truncate tablename;
to empty a table!
Lon F. Binder says:
September 22, 2009 at 8:34 pm
A little longer, but also a little more efficient because it does the drop (of all tables) in one shot:
mysql --user=YOUR_USERNAME --password=YOUR_PASSWORD -BNe "show tables" YOUR_DBSCHEMA_NAME | tr '\n' ',' | sed -e 's/,$//' | awk '{print "SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS = 0;DROP TABLE IF EXISTS " $1 ";SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS = 1;"}' | mysql --user=YOUR_USERNAME --password=YOUR_PASSWORD YOUR_DBSCHEMA_NAME
1. Russell says:
  July 21, 2010 at 10:08 pm
  This worked perfecly. Save me the monotony of deleting 300+ tables from a Magento Install
2. Manasi says:
  April 19, 2011 at 10:00 pm
  this was very useful….works great ! thanks !
3. james says:
  August 16, 2012 at 5:57 am
  Perfect worked
4. Vijayan says:
  May 4, 2015 at 5:24 pm
  Thank you so much. its working perfectly….
5. Niek Oost says:
  August 25, 2015 at 1:08 pm
  When the database contains tables with names that are the same as the MySQL reserved keywords (for instance ‘right`), you need a minor addition:
```
mysql --user=YOUR_USERNAME --password=YOUR_PASSWORD -BNe "show tables" YOUR_DBSCHEMA_NAME | tr '\n' ','  | sed -e 's/,/`,`/g' | sed -e 's/,`$//' | sed -e 's/^/`/' | awk '{print "SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS = 0;DROP TABLE IF EXISTS " $1 ";SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS = 1;"}' | mysql --user=YOUR_USERNAME --password=YOUR_PASSWORD YOUR_DBSCHEMA_NAME
```
  This adds back-ticks around the table names
Harshit says:
December 15, 2009 at 3:50 pm
I agree with Romina
I followed it and ended with completely deleting the database and not just the tables!! Your post title is absolutely incorrect. Please change it..
EVERYONE BE CAREFUL WHILE DOING THIS
Angie says:
May 14, 2010 at 2:38 am
I want to erase everything that has been looked up on google and everything that has already been looked up like a restart how can i reboot?
ANgie says:
May 14, 2010 at 2:39 am
I have an apple laptop i was the person earlier
Clemens says:
May 20, 2010 at 10:42 am
I like this even more.
echo “select concat(‘drop table ‘, table_name, ‘;’) from information_schema.tables where table_schema=schema()” | mysql CONNECT | grep “^drop table ” | mysql CONNECT
Make sure you connect to the right schema :p
1. Morten Vinding says:
  March 27, 2014 at 2:16 pm
  That’s the most elegant solution IMHO!
Anonymous says:
May 31, 2010 at 5:04 pm
You should disable FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS. I like Lon F. Binder solution.
Jack says:
July 15, 2010 at 5:42 pm
How can i change this script so that it erases the rows from some defined tables?
Shweta says:
September 6, 2010 at 9:29 am
thanks for the valuable information :)
herik says:
October 18, 2010 at 2:44 am
Thank’s A lot. For method#2 : it works!
Ashok yadav says:
October 31, 2010 at 9:33 am
To empty the database in MySql just go to the database and select the all tables (checkbox on of all tables) then select the “empty” action just down from the table names, then click “GO” button just right side of action selected .
Sutharsan says:
January 19, 2011 at 9:41 am
Call me paranoid, but I don’t like to put my database password in scripts. So I replaced the definition of MPASS with
```
read -s -p "Your database password: " MPASS
```
Thiyagarajan Veluchamy says:
February 11, 2011 at 4:45 pm
Thanks for nice ppost
PrinCe says:
May 6, 2011 at 9:55 am
simply rite click on databas and delete and chek on close connection :)
Sonet says:
June 1, 2011 at 4:06 am
Had to put the table name in quotes in the for loop:
$MYSQL -u $MUSER -p$MPASS $MDB -e “drop table \`$t\`”
1. Frank says:
  November 14, 2011 at 8:57 am
  Yep, me too. Wish I had read this far down the comments lol
Jason Goodwin says:
August 5, 2011 at 2:08 pm
I use the script all the time to save me from needing to add privileges again if I’m clearing out a db. Thanks a lot.
JP Lew says:
October 22, 2011 at 5:06 pm
thanks, exactly what I was looking for. I used this to replace my WordPress database.
risdiyanto says:
January 28, 2012 at 4:38 am
is it possible to use simple truncate on database?

little mod for remote hosts:

#!/bin/bash
MUSER="$1"
MPASS="$2"
MDB="$3"
HOST="$4"
 
# Detect paths
MYSQL=$(which mysql)
AWK=$(which awk)
GREP=$(which grep)
 
if [ $# -ne 4 ]
then
	echo "Usage: $0 {MySQL-User-Name} {MySQL-User-Password} {MySQL-Database-Name} {MySQL-Database-Host}"
	echo "Drops all tables from a MySQL"
	exit 1
fi
 
TABLES=$($MYSQL -h $HOST -u $MUSER -p$MPASS $MDB -e 'show tables' | $AWK '{ print $1}' | $GREP -v '^Tables' )
 
for t in $TABLES
do
	echo "Deleting $t table from $MDB database..."
	$MYSQL -h $HOST -u $MUSER -p$MPASS $MDB -e "drop table $t"
done

Combined Lon F. Binder, Sutharsan, and Andrea De Pirro’s suggestions into one script, using getopt to make the DB host and port optional:

#!/bin/bash

usage()
{
cat <<EOF
usage: $0 options

WARNING! This script will drop all tables from a MySQL database

OPTIONS:
   -u      Database username
   -d      Database/schema name
   -h      Host name (optional)
   -p      Port (optional)
EOF
}

USERNAME=
DBSCHEMA=
HOST=
PORT=

# Read options from command line
while getopts â€œu:d:h:pâ€ OPTION
do
     case $OPTION in
	 u)
	     USERNAME=$OPTARG
             ;;
	 d)
	     DBSCHEMA=$OPTARG
             ;;
         h)
	     HOST=$OPTARG
             ;;
         p)
             PORT=$OPTARG
             ;;
         ?)
             usage
             exit
             ;;
     esac
done

# Make sure all required options are supplied
if [[ -z $USERNAME ]] || [[ -z $DBSCHEMA ]] 
then
     usage
     exit 1
fi
 
# Read password from stdin
read -s -p "Your database password: " PASSWORD

# Construct MySQL command line options
MYSQL_OPTS="--user=$USERNAME --password=$PASSWORD"
if [[ ! -z $HOST ]]
then
    MYSQL_OPTS="$MYSQL_OPTS --host=$HOST"
fi 
if [[ ! -z $PORT ]]
then
    MYSQL_OPTS="$MYSQL_OPTS --port=$PORT"
fi 

# Get the table names
TABLES=$(mysql $MYSQL_OPTS -BNe "show tables" $DBSCHEMA | tr '\n' ',' | sed -e 's/,$//' | awk '{print "SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS = 0;DROP TABLE IF EXISTS " $1 ";SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS = 1;"}')

# Actually drop the tables
mysql $MYSQL_OPTS -BNe "$TABLES" $DBSCHEMA

GSC says:
July 21, 2012 at 2:22 pm
The script method worked like a charm on cento6.
In case the
———————-
$ ./drop.table.sh tom jerry quiz
———————–
doesnt work, since don’t have root access, you can also do it with the simple sh command.
———————-
[user@servername] sh drop.table.sh tom jerry quiz [enter]
———————-
Fernando Camargo says:
September 13, 2012 at 5:37 pm
Nice script. I changed it to drop all the views from a database. If you wanna see it, I posted at:
stackoverflow.com
Ebad says:
March 30, 2013 at 3:19 am
JUST BE CAREFUL!
I just wanted to delete my records from the tables not the tables itself and stored procedures! But I have deleted the whole database with this command.
Is there any way to recover ?
Bhaveshkumar says:
July 23, 2013 at 12:31 pm
Great! Keep it up
jeremia katambo says:
July 30, 2013 at 10:11 pm
wooow, thank you soo much this really helped me
shir says:
October 6, 2013 at 1:59 pm
thanks for sharing.. i’ve been searching for the answer for months

SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0;
SET @tables = NULL;
SELECT GROUP_CONCAT(table_schema, '.', table_name) INTO @tables
  FROM information_schema.tables 
  WHERE table_schema = 'database-name-here'; -- specify DB name here.

SET @tables = CONCAT('DROP TABLE ', @tables);
PREPARE stmt FROM @tables;
EXECUTE stmt;
DEALLOCATE PREPARE stmt;
SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=1;

Source here

leekh says:
March 24, 2014 at 7:28 am
I have an old Staff Attendance Program. There is a Master Program and all connected to msyql database. When I tried to open the Staff Attendance Program a message box pops up…”This program was last run on 12-Feb-2029. Current server date is 20-Mar-2014. Admin should change the server date.” When I opened the mysql tables to check, I can see a calendar table for year 2029. How to go about solving the problem please?
I am the headmaster of the school and I dont have any technical knowledge. Help please.
Thanks.
patricklee
Luis Pichardo says:
June 11, 2014 at 3:22 pm
The shell script worked like a charm. Thanks!

Worked perfectly. I made a few tweaks — added the hostname and put the password as the last argument. The modified one is below in case it is interesting to someone…

#!/bin/bash                                                                                                                                                                                            
HOST="$1"
MUSER="$2"
MDB="$3"  
MPASS="$4"

# Detect paths                                                                                                                                                                                         
MYSQL=$(which mysql)
AWK=$(which awk)
GREP=$(which grep)

if [ $# -ne 4 ]
then
    echo "Usage: $0 {MySQL-Host-Name} {MySQL-User-Name} {MySQL-Database-Name} {MySQL-User-Password}"
    echo "Drops all tables from a MySQL"
    exit 1
fi

TABLES=$($MYSQL -h $HOST -u $MUSER -p$MPASS $MDB -e 'show tables' | $AWK '{ print $1}' | $GREP -v '^Tables' )

for t in $TABLES
do
    echo "Deleting $t table from $MDB database..."
    $MYSQL -h $HOST -u $MUSER -p$MPASS $MDB -e "drop table $t"
done

sam says:
July 18, 2014 at 9:49 pm
If you want to force delete the tables even if they are any foreign key relation exists , just update the line
$MYSQL -u $MUSER -p$MPASS $MDB -e “drop table $t”
to
$MYSQL -u $MUSER -p$MPASS $MDB -e “SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS = 0;drop table $t”

In case you don’t want to post your database password in clear text in the terminal (also added requirement for host designation:

#!/bin/bash
MUSER="$1"
MDB="$2"
MDBS="$3"

# Detect paths
MYSQL=$(which mysql)
AWK=$(which awk)
GREP=$(which grep)

if [ $# -ne 3 ]
then
        echo "Usage: $0 {MySQL-User-Name} {MySQL-Database-Name} {MySQL-Database-Server}"
        echo "Drops all tables from a MySQL"
        exit 1
fi

echo -e "Please enter MySQL password for $MUSER"
read -s MPASS

TABLES=$($MYSQL -u $MUSER -p$MPASS -D $MDB -h $MDBS -e 'show tables' | $AWK '{ print $1}' | $GREP -v '^Tables' )

for t in $TABLES
do
        echo "Deleting $t table from $MDB database..."
        $MYSQL -u $MUSER -p$MPASS -D $MDB -h $MDBS -e "drop table $t"
done

lee goddard says:
May 22, 2015 at 9:02 am
Don’t forget about procedures, triggers, events…

I fixed up the script to make it a bit more secure. The current version has you enter the password on the command line, which would have it in the shell history file. The modification will prevent that from happening.

# Detect paths
MYSQL=$(which mysql)
AWK=$(which awk)
GREP=$(which grep)

if [ $# -ne 2 ]
then
    echo "Usage: $0 {MySQL-User-Name} {MySQL-Database-Name}"
    echo "Drops all tables from a MySQL"
    exit 1
fi

TABLES=$($MYSQL -u $MUSER -p$MPASS $MDB -e 'show tables' | $AWK '{ print $1}' | $GREP -v '^Tables' )

echo -n Enter Password for $MUSER:
read -s MPASS

for t in $TABLES
do
    echo "Deleting $t table from $MDB database..."
    $MYSQL -u $MUSER -p$MPASS $MDB -e "drop table $t"
done

Paul Chabot says:
September 14, 2017 at 5:10 am
Urgh, forgot a few things in that comment, so here is a link to the updated version.
https://github.com/paulchabotca/pubscripts/blob/master/mysql/dropTables.sh

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