HOW TO #4 – Mass (Hard) Delete Data

Overview

The command to delete data is Remove-SfRecords that will take a one-column .csv file with the record Ids of the records to be deleted.

For the following examples, we assume:

• An authentication token for the target org in $MyOrg as created by Get-SfAuthToken
• A .csv file LeadsToBeDeleted.csv list of Lead Record Ids to be deleted, for example exported via
  • sfextract $MyOrg Lead "SELECT Id FROM Lead" LeadsToBeDeleted.csv
• This implicitly means, that we can rely on the auto-creation of the .sdl mapping file which will consist of just one line in this case: Id=Id
• For a 'Bulk API Hard Delete' operation, your user in the org has got the proper permissions set, e.g. as described in
  • Activation of Bulk API Hard Delete on System Administrator Profile

Soft-Delete for Small Number of Records

A soft-delete operation means, the records will we kept in the recycle bin of your org for a while.

To delete a small number of records via SOAP API:

Remove-SfRecords $MyOrg Lead LeadsToBeDeleted.csv

Hard-Delete and/or Large Number of Records

Considerations:

• If you expect a large number of records to be deleted, you might consider using the Bulk API.
• If you want to hard-delete records, this will require Bulk API.
• If your delete operations affect only Leads, you may opt for Bulk Parallel operation for faster execution time.
• However, if your delete job implies cascading delete operations, you might need to consider serial execution. This might be the case in the following scenario:
  • Deleting a large number of Leads that are assigned to at least one Campaign via CampaignMember record each.
  • Deleting a Lead will then do a cascaded delete on the CampaignMember records.
  • Each deletion of a CampaignMember record will, as it is master/detail to the Campaign, also update the Campaign.
  • Means: Parallel execution of Leads in this case might cause record locking congestion on the Campaign record.
• If there is a lot of automation logic (Apex Triggers, Flows) involved, you might want to reduce batch size to address issues with governor limits.

Some examples:

• Remove-SfRecords $MyOrg Lead LeadsToBeDeleted.csv -Bulk Parallel standard soft-delete via Bulk API with default batch size of 2000
• Remove-SfRecords $MyOrg Lead LeadsToBeDeleted.csv -Bulk SerialHardDelete hard-delete via Bulk API in serial mode with default batch size of 2000
• Remove-SfRecords $MyOrg Lead LeadsToBeDeleted.csv -Bulk SerialHardDelete -BatchSize 100 hard-delete via Bulk API in serial mode with a reduced batch size of 100