Deleting Bulk Data

The bulk delete feature helps you manage system storage consumption and maintain data quality by removing old, obsolete, or invalid data from the system.

The bulk data that can be removed using the bulk delete feature includes:

• Stale data.
• Data not relevant to business.
• Old test or sample data.
• Data incorrectly imported from other systems.

Bulk delete can run asynchronously in the background without blocking other system activities.

You can use bulk delete to perform the following:

• Delete data across multiple entities.
• Delete entity instances for a given entity.
• Receive an e-mail notification when bulk delete is finished.
• Delete data periodically.
• Schedule the start time of a recurring bulk delete.
• Retrieve the information about the failures that occurred during bulk delete.

The job of bulk delete is represented by the bulk delete operation entity instance. It includes the following information:

• Number of successfully deleted entity instances by this particular bulk delete operation.
• Number of entity instances that this particular bulk delete operation failed to delete.
• Whether the bulk delete job is a recurring job or not.
• Start time of the bulk delete job.

The asynchronous job of bulk delete performs the following operations:

• Deletes the entity instances that match the query expressions passed in the QuerySet property of BulkDeleteRequest. The bulk delete job deletes the entity instances that were created before the job execution starts.
• Retrieves the failures that occur during bulk delete. The failures are represented by the bulk delete failure entity instances that contain a description of the failure and the error number. You can retrieve the bulk delete failures by using the Retrieve method or the RetrieveMultiple method.

If a bulk delete job fails or terminates prematurely, any entity instances that were deleted before the failure or termination of the job are not rolled back and remain deleted.

For executing bulk delete requests, you need to generate a schema for operation BulkDelete, which does not link to any entity. In iIT, you can find this operation in the Global Operations node, as shown in the following image.

During run time, iWay Application Adapter for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 On-Premises does not respond to the user for delete confirmations.

To view a sample bulk delete operation, see Bulk Delete Sample.