Deleting millions of rows in MySQL

Question

I recently found and fixed a bug in a site I was working on that resulted in millions of duplicate rows of data in a table that will be quite large even without them (still

Answer 1

According to the mysql documentation, TRUNCATE TABLE is a fast alternative to DELETE FROM. Try this:

TRUNCATE TABLE table_name

I tried this on 50M rows and it was done within two mins.

Note: Truncate operations are not transaction-safe; an error occurs when attempting one in the course of an active transaction or active table lock