Counting the number of deleted rows in a SQL Server stored procedure

Question

In SQL Server 2005, is there a way of deleting rows and being told how many were actually deleted?

I could do a select count(*) with the s

Answer 1

I found a case where you can't use @@rowcount, like when you want to know the distinct count of the values that were deleted instead of the total count. In this case you would have to do the following:

delete from mytable 
where datefield = '5-Oct-2008' 
output deleted.datefield into #doomed

select count(distinct datefield)
from #doomed

The syntax error in the OP was because output did not include deleted before the datefield field name.