Delete

Jump to the Code block for a combined complete example.

Setup

The following examples will use the setup below to illustrate single record deletion in an Aerospike database.

import aerospike

# Define host configuration
config = {
    'hosts': [ ('127.0.0.1', 3000) ]
}
# Establishes a connection to the server
client = aerospike.client(config).connect()

# Creates a key with the namespace "sandbox", set "ufodata", and user key 5001
key = ('sandbox', 'ufodata', 5001)

Policies

Just as Create and Update, Delete utilizes write policies that can be defined per command.

The following example creates a write policy that enables durable deletes.

# Create a write policy
remove_policy = {'durable_delete': True}

Note

Record deletion can also be controlled through expiration, a write policy that defines the time-to-live (ttl), or number of seconds a record will live before being removed by the server. The default ttl is to live forever.

Refer to Data Retention for more information.

Delete a record

Default policy

Aerospike deletes a record efficiently by only dropping the primary index entry. The record space on device is recovered during garbage collection.

The following example shows how to delete a record using the default write policy.

Caution

Using the default write policy could result in having previously persisted versions of deleted objects resurrected upon a cold restart of the namespace. See Durable Deletes below for more information on preventing zombie records.

# Delete record with default write policy
client.remove(key)

# Close the connection to the server
client.close()

Note

Updating a bin value to null, when it is the only bin in the record, deletes the record. See Delete a Bin for information on setting a bin value to null.

Durable deletes

When a command results in deletion of a record and the durable delete write policy is set to true, a tombstone record is written to disk to prevent previous versions of the record from returning during a cold restart. Refer to Durable Deletes for more information.

The following example uses the write policy set above to durably delete a record.

# Durably delete a record with the write policy
client.remove(key, policy=remove_policy)

# Close the connection to the server
client.close()

Code block

Expand this section for a single code block to durably delete a record

import aerospike

# Define host configuration
config = {
    'hosts': [ ('127.0.0.1', 3000) ]
}
# Establishes a connection to the server
client = aerospike.client(config).connect()

# Creates a key with the namespace "sandbox", set "ufodata", and user key 5001
key = ('sandbox', 'ufodata', 5001)

# Create a write policy
remove_policy = {'durable_delete': True}

# Durably delete a record with the write policy
client.remove(key, policy=remove_policy)

# Close the connection to the server
client.close()