Delete records

This page shows you how to use the delete endpoint to remove records from an index namespace.

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Delete records by ID

Since Pinecone records can always be efficiently accessed using their ID, deleting by ID is the most efficient way to remove specific records.

# pip install "pinecone[grpc]"
from pinecone.grpc import PineconeGRPC as Pinecone

pc = Pinecone(api_key="YOUR_API_KEY")

# To get the unique host for an index, 
# see https://docs.pinecone.io/guides/manage-data/target-an-index
index = pc.Index(host="INDEX_HOST")

index.delete(ids=["id-1", "id-2"], namespace='example-namespace')

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Delete records by metadata

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Delete records in a namespace

In serverless indexes, it’s safe to delete an entire namespace or a large number of records at once because reads and writes do not share compute resources. There are two ways to delete records from a namespace:

• Delete all records in a namespace
• Delete an entire namespace

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Delete all records in a namespace

To delete all of the records in a namespace but not the namespace itself, provide a namespace parameter and specify the appropriate deleteAll parameter for your SDK. To target the default namespace, set namespace to "__default__".

# pip install "pinecone[grpc]"
from pinecone.grpc import PineconeGRPC as Pinecone

pc = Pinecone(api_key="YOUR_API_KEY")

# To get the unique host for an index, 
# see https://docs.pinecone.io/guides/manage-data/target-an-index
index = pc.Index(host="INDEX_HOST")

index.delete(delete_all=True, namespace='example-namespace')

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Delete an entire namespace

To delete an entire namespace and all of its records, see Delete a namespace.

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Delete an entire index

To remove all records from an index, delete the index and recreate it.

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Data freshness

Pinecone is eventually consistent, so there can be a slight delay before new or changed records are visible to queries. You can view index stats to check data freshness.