help with time deletion of row in sql

[greedyisg00d]

Hi I am currently working on a scheduler for meeting,conference etc. This is my scenario. I have 3 fields in my db(employee, date_from, date_to).

Employee: greedyisgood
Date_from: 2009-02-14
Date_to: 2009-02-15

What I want is when the date_to is already elapse or past, example today is already 2009-02-16. The entire rows with previous dates will be automatically erase in the database. So that the user can create a new schedule again.
Is it possible? Thanks in advance

[Weedpacket]

DELETE FROM the_table WHERE date_to < NOW()

Incidentally, a lot of the time deleting records is unnecessary; updating them as outdated or (if that causes performance issues) moving them to an historical table tends to pay off (since 2001 there has been more digital storage media in the world than digital data to store on it, so in that sense there's no excuse to delete anything).

[greedyisg00d]

Hi I see your point there but what I want is to delete records from the database automatically without user interaction. Meaning when dates are already in past it will be deleted automatically. Any idea on how it works ? Thanks

[Weedpacket]

I kind of suspect that such a facility would not be built into the DBMS natively (for the reasons outlined above); but a cron job could be used. Depends on when you want it done; "automatically" doesn't say anything about when. You could have it as the first statement sent whenever anyone connects, for example.

Don't forget that deleted records aren't necessarily physically removed from the database files until the dbms determines that it can get rid of them without an excessive performance hit, and that indexes on the affected tables need to be rebuilt whenever a record is deleted.

[greedyisg00d]

Ok I understand now thanks for your help men