Records are deleted from a DP4 database using the rec_kill() function. rec_kill() works in a similar way to rec_post(), i.e. the record is not deleted from the database immediately, but only once the current transaction is committed (using db_update(),db_commit() or db_checkpoint())
Flags passed to rec_kill() can cause the deletion to fail if the record is a parent of other records still on the database, or automatically delete the child records (this is known as a cascaded delete in SQL).