This page shows you how to delete records from an index namespace.

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 from a namespace.

To remove records from the default namespace, specify "__default__" as the namespace in your request.

# 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')

Delete records by metadata

To delete records from a namespace based on their metadata values, pass a metadata filter expression to the delete operation. This deletes all records in the namespace that match the filter expression.

For example, the following code deletes all records with a genre field set to documentary from namespace example-namespace:

# 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(
    filter={
        "genre": {"$eq": "documentary"}
    },
    namespace="example-namespace" 
)

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')

Delete an entire namespace

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

Delete an entire index

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

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.