Remove empty rows from the database

Question

I'm writing a script to alter the post content column in the database and I just notice it has a lot of empty rows, these seem to be deleted posts that now have no content or anything, I don't like them.

Could i just DELETE from posts WHERE content = ''; without breaking anything?

The database has around 40k rows, i can't afford to break it, its backed up tho.

Answer 1

I'd imagine those rows with empty content are more often then not revisions rather than trashed posts. To make sure you don't delete stuff you want to keep I suggest you add the post_status to your SQL, using trash and auto-draft as value - the latter are the revisions. Btw the table column is called post_content not content. So your SQL would look something along the lines of the following:

DELETE FROM wp_posts
  WHERE post_content = ""
  AND   post_status = "trash"
  OR    post_status = "auto-draft";

You could of course use $wpdb and its delete method to achieve the same.