Services or capabilities described in AWS documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the AWS European Sovereign Cloud Region, see the AWS European Sovereign Cloud User Guide.

Differences between a relational (SQL) database and DynamoDB when removing a table

In SQL, you use the DROP TABLE statement to remove a table. In Amazon DynamoDB, you use the DeleteTable operation.

Removing a table with SQL

When you no longer need a table and want to discard it permanently, you would use the DROP TABLE statement in SQL.

DROP TABLE Music;

After a table is dropped, it cannot be recovered. (Some relational databases do allow you to undo a DROP TABLE operation, but this is vendor-specific functionality and it is not widely implemented.)

Removing a table in DynamoDB

In DynamoDB, DeleteTable is a similar operation. In the following example, the table is permanently deleted.

{
    TableName: "Music"
}