Common Uses

This step will cover common scenarios where the bulk deletion feature could be useful.

The bulk deletion feature helps you to maintain data quality and manage the consumption of system storage in Common Data Service for Apps by deleting data that you no longer need. It allows the removal of a large amount of specific, targeted data on a schedule.

For following are common scenarios where the bulk deletion feature could be useful.

Stale Data

As the system grows and over time, data entries may become stale. For example, consider large numbers of leads acquired as a result of a massive marketing campaign targeting specific events.

As the event passes, leads that haven’t been actioned on yet, become obsolete. Bulk delete in this example would utilise a view that returns all leads for this marketing campaign that are still active.

In another example, it may be safe to assume that any email activities older than seven years are no longer required to be kept in CDS for Apps.

A simple view returning all emails older than seven years would allow to run bulk deletion job, removing the records including attachments and thus potentially freeing significant storage space.

Irrelevant Data

Bulk deletion jobs can be used to delete data that is no longer relevant to the business. For example, a business may have opened a new engineering subsidiary and extended its CDS for Apps to deal with specific matters of that department.

Later on, the engineering business is sold, and parts of the CDS for Apps are no longer relevant or required. In fact, it’s not uncommon for the company to be legally obliged to delete any records in relation to the sold business. In this instance, you would use a number of bulk delete jobs to clean up all entities from the solution.

Sample or Test Data

When the performance of the system is tested, often large volumes of data are imported into CDS for Apps to simulate the production workloads. When tests are complete and data no longer required, a set of bulk delete jobs can be used to remove unneeded test or sample data.

Erroneous Data

Often large volumes of data are imported into CDS for Apps from other systems. If mistakes are made, and data is not imported correctly, bulk delete would allow easy cleanup.

Test or Troubleshooting Data

During testing of workflows (or by mistake), a flag may be set to retain job entries for successfully completed jobs. That would cause the system jobs log to grow.

Once testing is complete (or error is spotted by detecting the abnormal size of the log), successful log entries can be deleted from the system.

During the plug-in and custom workflow activity troubleshooting, developers may request for the plug-in logging to be enabled.

Depending on the size and complexity of the deployment this setting may cause the trace log to grow very fast. Once troubleshooting is complete, and the flag is reset, you can use the bulk deletion job against the traces entity to delete any log entries related to the plug-ins.