How can I delete all the records which varchar contains any of a list of elements?

Question

I have Trees:

Trees(IDNodo, Path, color, ....)

IDMytable is a autonumeric (bigint) and path is a varchar(MAX) that contains the complete route to a node in my tree.

I would like to delete all the nodes and subnodes, so I can do:

delete from trees where Path like '%[IDNode]'%

This delete the node and all the subnodes.

But if I want to delete all the nodes that have an specific property, I can get these nodes with this query:

select * from Trees where Color = 'Red';

This gives me all the nodes in all the trees that are red. I get many IDNodes. Then I want to delete all the subnodes of each red node.

delete from trees where Path like IN (select * from Trees where Color = 'Red');

If path is a long, for example, I can use "IN" but I don't know if there is an equivalent when the field is a varchar.

I would like to avoid the use of a recursive procedure.

Answer 1

You want to make your delete query like below

delete from trees where Path 
IN (select Path from Trees where Color = 'Red');

But the above query is same as saying

delete from Trees where Color = 'Red';