CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Roughly 60K individual contacts were imported into my organization's database that now need to be removed; thankfully on import they were assigned to their own group.  When I view the contacts in the group and select  the option to delete all of the contacts I get the following error:

HTTP Error 500 (Internal Server Error): An unexpected condition was encountered while the server was attempting to fulfill the request.

Being the SQL geek I have decided to just manually "delete" (set the contacts' is_deleted flag to 1) and call it done. 

UPDATE civicrm_contact C
    INNER JOIN civicrm_group_contact GC ON C.id = GC.contact_id AND GC.group_id = 138
SET
    C.is_deleted = 1
;

It didn't appear that any data in child entities to civicrm_contact needed to be updated.  Is this correct?

however if u really dont want the 60K contacts u should do a permanent delete on them rather than just setting "is_deleted" which keeps the contact info and hence increases table size / reduces performance etc

lobo

I used a DELETE query to remove the contacts' records from the civicrm_group_contacts table then from the CiviCRM Manage Groups page I removed the group.  Case closed.