Delete Rows In One Table By Referencing Another Table Info

I have one table that has unique id's associated with each row of information. I want to delete rows of information in one table that have a unique ID that references information in another table.

Here is a basic breakdown of what I am trying to do:

Table1 (the table where the rows need to be deleted from)
Column_x (Holds the id that is unique to the various rows of data - User ID)

Table2 (Holds the user information & has the associated ID)
Column_z (holds the User ID)

I tried this on a test set of tables and could not get it to work. What I am trying to do is skip all rows of Table1 that have ID's present in Table2, and delete the rows of ID's that are not present in Table2.

Code:


SELECT Column_z
FROM dbo.Table2
DELETE FROM dbo.Table1
WHERE Column_z <> Column_x


This did not seem to do what I needed, it did not delete any rows at all.

I wanted it to delete all rows in Table1 that did not have a reference to a user ID that matched any ID's in Column_z of Table2

Then I tried another scenerio that I also needed to do:

Code:


SELECT Column_z, Column_a
FROM dbo.Table2
DELETE FROM dbo.Table1
WHERE Column_z = Column_x AND Column_a='0'



'0' being the user id is inactive so I wanted to delete rows in Table1 and remove all references to users that were in an inactive status in Table2.

Neither one of the Queries wanted to work for me in the Query Analyzer when I ran them. It just said (0) rows affected.

Any ideas on what I am doing wrong here?