Delete all drafts?

Question

This is a common query to delete all post revisions:

DELETE a,b,c
FROM wp_posts a
LEFT JOIN wp_term_relationships b ON (a.ID = b.object_id)
LEFT JOIN wp_postmeta c ON (a.ID = c.post_id)
WHERE a.post_type = 'revision'

Will this work to delete all drafts?

DELETE a,b,c
FROM wp_posts a
LEFT JOIN wp_term_relationships b ON (a.ID = b.object_id)
LEFT JOIN wp_postmeta c ON (a.ID = c.post_id)
WHERE a.post_type = 'draft'

and is it better than this since it also deletes postmeta?

 DELETE FROM posts WHERE post_status = ‘draft’

Answer 1

draft is not a post_type, it's a post_status. So you should use your second block of code with that substitution:

DELETE a,b,c
FROM wp_posts a
LEFT JOIN wp_term_relationships b ON (a.ID = b.object_id)
LEFT JOIN wp_postmeta c ON (a.ID = c.post_id)
WHERE a.post_status = 'draft'

Answer 2

I would suggest if u want to delete any post manually from wp_posts. you need to perform the following steps:-

1. Remove from postmeta table.

delete FROM wp_postmeta WHERE post_id IN
    (
        select id from wp_posts where post_status='draft'
    );

2. Remove from wp_term_relationships table.

delete FROM wp_term_relationships WHERE object_id IN
    (
        select id from wp_posts where post_status='draft'
    );

3. Remove from wp_posts table.

delete from wp_posts where post_status='draft'