It is also a good practice to wrap such things in BEGIN TRANSACTION / COMMIT or ROLLBACK ... not only because it's usually more-efficient that way, but also so that it is "cleanly all-or-nothing." Either the delete succeeds, completely, or it never happened at all. You can also test your work by starting a transaction, running the query, checking the result, and either (looks good!) COMMIT or (oops!) ROLLBACK.