Drops a column from an existing table.

Syntax

Flow chart showing the syntax of the ALTER TABLE keyword Flow chart showing the syntax of ALTER TABLE with DROP COLUMN keyword

Description

Drops (removes) a column from an existing table.

Before the operation can proceed it commits any current transaction. Hence transaction is committed regardless of the success or failure of the drop.

Dropping a column does not lock the table for reading and does not wait on any reads to finish. Drop column will also attempt to remove column files from all partitions, thus freeing up disk space right away. On Windows OS that may not be possible and file remove operation is postponed until files are released by all threads. However logical drop column will succeed on Windows in presence of active readers.

Example

The following example deletes the column called comment from the table ratings

  1. ALTER TABLE ratings DROP COLUMN movieId;