Delete the 'first' record from a table in SQL Server, without a WHERE condition

WITH  q AS
        (
        SELECT TOP 1 *
        FROM    mytable
        /* You may want to add ORDER BY here */
        )
DELETE
FROM    q

Note that

DELETE TOP (1)
FROM   mytable

will also work, but, as stated in the documentation:

The rows referenced in the TOP expression used with INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE are not arranged in any order.

Therefore, it's better to use WITH and an ORDER BY clause, which will let you specify more exactly which row you consider to be the first.

depends on your DBMS

-- MYSql:
DELETE FROM table LIMIT 1;
-- Postgres:
DELETE FROM table LIMIT 1;
-- MSSql:
DELETE TOP(1) FROM table;
-- Oracle:
DELETE FROM table WHERE ROWNUM = 1;

No, AFAIK, it's not possible to do it portably.

There's no defined "first" record anyway - on different SQL engines it's perfectly possible that "SELECT * FROM table" might return the results in a different order each time.

Define "First"? If the table has a PK then it will be ordered by that, and you can delete by that:

DECLARE @TABLE TABLE
(
    ID INT IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
    Data NVARCHAR(50) NOT NULL
)

INSERT INTO @TABLE(Data)
SELECT 'Hello' UNION
SELECT 'World' 

SET ROWCOUNT 1
DELETE FROM @TABLE
SET ROWCOUNT 0

SELECT * FROM @TABLE

If the table has no PK, then ordering won't be guaranteed...