CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hello all!

We're running civicrm 3.2.1 as a pilot and we have a lot of imported data which we wish to permanently delete and start over with.

Since the system is a live pilot, we also have a lot of good data which we would like to retain.

The trouble is, that civicrm takes an awfully long time to delete the data and our tests show that it appears to be CPU intensive, for that matter, on our system at least, we always appear to be maxing out on CPU and one of my techies (at least one who's less of an accidental one than me!) believes that civicrm isn't that efficient on bulk operations, with a deletion of 250,000 records taking at the very minimum, 4 days!

Can someone help me out or point me in the right direction please?

Thanks!

1. how do u differentiate between "good" data and "test" data? doing 250K manually does not seem feasible

2. might want to try using the API and doing multiple searches / deletes. Might be easier to delete contacts in batches, since most of the contact deletion is handled by the database (via cascaded deletes). Note that you will need PHP/MySQL skills to do it this way

lobo

Lobo, I can easily get the bad data into a smart group...it's already been put into the wastebasket...so I have (or had!) 260,000 records in the wastebasket. We have a tech who has knocked up some SQL and we're deleting in batches of 1000, so no problem there. Thanks!