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C program to delete records from a database table in SQLite

Here, we are going to write a C program to delete records from a database table in SQLite.
By Nidhi Last updated : March 10, 2024

Prerequisites

The following packages need to be installed in the ubuntu machine for Sqlite connectivity using the C program.

sudo apt install sqlite3
sudo apt install gcc
sudo apt install libsqlite3-dev

Problem Solution

In this program, we will delete records from the employee table using source code in SQLite.

Program/Source Code

The source code to delete records from a database table in Linux is given below. The given program is compiled and executed successfully on Ubuntu 20.04.

//C program to delete records from a database table in SQLite.

#include <sqlite3.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main(void)
{
    sqlite3* db_ptr;
    char* errMesg = 0;

    int ret = 0;

    ret = sqlite3_open("MyDb.db", &db_ptr);

    if (ret != SQLITE_OK) {
        printf("Database opening error\n");
    }

    char* sql_stmt = "DELETE FROM Employee";

    ret = sqlite3_exec(db_ptr, sql_stmt, 0, 0, &errMesg);

    if (ret != SQLITE_OK) {

        printf("Error in SQL statement: %s\n", errMesg);

        sqlite3_free(errMesg);
        sqlite3_close(db_ptr);

        return 1;
    }

    printf("Employee records deleted successfully\n");
    sqlite3_close(db_ptr);

    return 0;
}

Output

$ gcc delete.c -o delete -lsqlite3 -std=c99
$ ./delete 
Employee records deleted successfully
$ sqlite3 MyDb.db 
SQLite version 3.31.1 2020-01-27 19:55:54
Enter ".help" for usage hints.
sqlite> select * from employee;

In the above program, we included the sqlite3.h header file to uses SQLite related functions. Here, we deleted records of employee table in "MyDb.db" database using sqlite3_exec() by passing specified SQL statement.

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