How to per­man­ently delete a database using DROP DATABASE in MariaDB

The command DROP DATABASE per­man­ently deletes entire databases in MariaDB. Therefore, the command requires the DROP privilege on the database concerned and should be used with great caution.

DROP DATABASE in MariaDB

DROP DATABASE is a very effective statement for MariaDB, which should only be used extremely carefully. It is used to delete a database from a server structure. Once the command has been executed, the entire database including all tables and data is ir­re­triev­ably lost and can no longer be accessed. Only user rights that were es­tab­lished when using MariaDB CREATE USER are not auto­mat­ic­ally revoked. In MariaDB, DROP DATABASE requires the DROP privilege on the database concerned. Other commands such as DELETE DATABASE for MariaDB or REMOVE DATABASE for MariaDB do not exist.

Syntax with and without IF EXISTS

The syntax of DROP DATABASE in MariaDB is as follows:

DROP DATABASE Name_of_database;

Replace the place­hold­er ‘Name_of_database’ with the name of the specific database you want to delete.

You can op­tion­ally include IF EXISTS to avoid receiving an error message if the database is not found on your server.

DROP DATABASE IF EXISTS Name_of_database;

How does DROP DATABASE in MariaDB work?

To il­lus­trate how DROP DATABASE works in MariaDB, we will use a simple example. Let’s imagine that a database called ‘Tasks_2023’ is no longer needed. Therefore, we use SHOW DATABASES to check if the database is still on the server and then remove it. This is the code:

mysql> SHOW DATABASES;
mysql> DROP DATABASE Tasks_2023;