I've been using the TRUNCATE statement in SQL to remove all rows from a table. However, I'm curious about its internal mechanism. Does TRUNCATE technically drop and recreate the table in the background, or is it a more efficient way to remove data while preserving the table structure?
Can someone explain the technical details of how TRUNCATE works behind the scenes? Any insights or references to relevant documentation would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
Answer:
TRUNCATE TABLE statement does not technically drop and recreate the table in the background. Instead, it efficiently removes all rows from the table while keeping the table structure intact. It achieves this by deallocating data pages, making it a faster option for large tables compared to using DELETE.
Source Link here-(dev.mysql.com)
Document Summary:
The MySQL documentation on the TRUNCATE TABLE statement explains that TRUNCATE is a DDL (Data Definition Language) statement used to efficiently remove all rows from a table while preserving the table structure. Unlike DELETE, which removes rows one by one, TRUNCATE is optimized to work with large tables and is faster because it deallocates the data pages used by the table and releases the storage back to the system.