Question:
How to request a Physical Delete on a Veeva CRM Org?
Answer:
Veeva recommends Salesforce perform a Physical Delete immediately after Hard Deleting large amount of data, especially for data that is synced down to users offline devices. While Hard Delete records will be sent to a purge queue, Salesforce Support can peform a Physical Delete manually, and this can be scheduled ahead of time.
Submit a ticket with Veeva Support who will work with Salesforce to perform a Physical Delete after the Hard Delete process completes. The following information is required:
- Confirmation that the Recycle Bin is emptied for the Org.
- The admin account is granted Salesforce Support login access for one week.
- The 18-digit Org ID and the Org Name.
- A bulleted list of objects that the Physical Delete is to run against.
- The date Hard Delete process will start and an estimate of when it will complete.
Additional Considerations:
Follow Salesforce's general recommendations when deleting unwanted data within your organization: Delete unwanted data in an organization
Best Practices to Consider:
- Utilize hard delete whenever possible.
- Deleting will not physically remove the data from Salesforce.com immediately; however, it will bypass the recycling bin so the data is picked up for physical delete as soon as possible.
- SOQL QueryAll includes records deleted but not yet purged.
- Do not rely on the recycling bin for large data recovery efforts.
- Schedule the archival process during off-work hours.
- If the integration landscape permits, utilize the bulk API to perform extracts and deletes.
- When designing selective queries, note that the following operators will prevent the usage of indexes:
- !=
- like
- Not like
- Comparison operators (when used with text and text fields)
- Leading wildcards, or nondeterministic or cross-object formula fields.
Data deletes go through 3 stages:
- Soft Deletes go into the recycle bin.
-
Hard Deletes go into a delete queue.
- These records can still be found by QueryAll which includes workbench include deleted.
- Physical Delete (purge) removes the record from the database (salesforce sweeper process).
Related Documentation:
Salesforce Documentation: Deleting Data