Deleting records before a certain date

Question

How would I go about deleting all records from a MySQL table from before a certain date, where the date column is in DATETIME format?

An example datetime is 20

Answer 1

This helped me delete data based on different attributes. This is dangerous so make sure you back up database or the table before doing it:

mysqldump -h hotsname -u username -p password database_name > backup_folder/backup_filename.txt

Now you can perform the delete operation:

delete from table_name where column_name < DATE_SUB(NOW() , INTERVAL 1 DAY)

This will remove all the data from before one day. For deleting data from before 6 months:

delete from table_name where column_name < DATE_SUB(NOW() , INTERVAL 6 MONTH)