What do you exactly mean? You can always do it in the back-end, it is safer as removing the article will remove all the references (link to images, files, topics, etc...). If you remove the article entry from the database, you will only get to a point of data inconsistency and I am sure you don't want that :-)
All Best,
Post edited by Holman Romero at 2012-03-30 05:32:03