Bulk Deletion in Dataverse: A Beginner's Guide

We recently encountered a challenge with Dataverse capacity on the client side. One way to overcome this issue is to buy additional capacity, but before doing that we looked at the capacity metrics in the Power Platform admin center. Our investigation revealed that several test environments were still storing data, unnecessarily occupying valuable space. There are many ways to address this issue which also includes purchasing additional capacity. For this case we're considering the removal of these test datasets. But how? In this article, we are going to explore the topic of bulk deletion.

But why bulk deletion?

Picture the task of manually screening through thousands of records to identify and eliminate test data - sounds like a tedious process, right? This is where the power of bulk deletion becomes highly valuable. This functionality enables you to efficiently remove large sets of data in a single action. Not only are you saving time from doing this, but it also helps you to have a healthy tenant.

How to bulk delete? - A step-by-step guide

• Login to your Dataverse environment, and then navigate to the "advanced settings" section.

• Open the settings menu, and within the system tab, you'll locate the data management icon.

• Here we see the "bulk record deletion" option. When we select that option, we get an overview of all the previous bulk deletion jobs. But in our case, we are going to go ahead and create a new job.

• When we select the next button, the wizard takes us to the next step where we can define criteria.

Look for: Shows all resources in that environment. In my case, I have created a dummy table (Bulk_Deletes) with a few thousand records.

Use Saved View: Here you could specify a particular view that you have created for the table. For example - inactive records.

Query: In the query section, we could define our search criteria. In my case, I want to delete only certain types of records.

Preview Records: This button shows the preview of your query results that you might want to delete.

• Once we are satisfied with our search query, we go to the next step.

We can then give a name to the Bulk Deletion Job, and schedule it. This is a nice feature, as after every test deployment cycle we could run this job to clear the dataset. We could also send a notification to the Product owner to keep him updated.

• The next step shows us an overview of the bulk deletion job that we just created.

• In the pending jobs, we see our bulk deletion job in the queue.

• As this demo only involves 1000ish records that are going to be deleted, the process is going to be fast. We can then check our finished job to see if all the queried records have been deleted or if we have any failures.

• My demo list had 5000+ records, and after the bulk deletion job the list is now reduced to 3402 records.

Best Practices

A few things to keep in mind while you perform bulk deletion Jobs.

1. Data Backup: Please backup your data before performing any bulk deletion.
2. Production Environment: Please refrain from performing bulk deletion operation in live environments. Only do it if it's absolutely critical and necessary.

Common Pitfalls

• Permissions: Make sure that you have the necessary permission to delete records.
• Query: Double check your queries to avoid any errors during the runtime of bulk deletion job.

Conclusion

As you can see, bulk deletion in Dataverse isn't that complex. I hope with this 101 guide, you are able to handle and manage your data in an efficient way.