Deleting Contacts from UCS DB

[AndyB]

I am planning to delete a large number of contacts directly from the UCS database.  Does anyone have experience or tips in doing this?  From what I can see of the DB structure I would need to identify the record to be deleted in the “contact” table and then delete all corresponding records from the “ContactAttribute” table (where “ContactId” matches).

Do you know if it is ok to delete from UCS DB directly (delete from “contact” and “ContactAttribute” tables only) which would leave some interactions referencing an invalid contact ID; or do I need a more sophisticated delete routine that would identify the contact to be deleted and first delete all related interactions before deleting the record from the contact tables?

[René]

Hi Andy,

I would recommend you to delete even the interactions related to the contacts you're going to remove. I'm not 100 % sure about that but these "orphaned" interactions remains in the database forever - archiving/purging process will ignore these.

Don't forget the tables "Document" and "Attachment" when deleting the interactions as these are used to store attachments and bodies of email interactions.

René

[AndyB]

Hi René,
Thanks for you advice.  I also thought about deleting a contact using GAD and capturing the DB interaction on SQL to understand exactly what is happening within the UCS DB.  Either way I will update this post with the outcome.

Andy

[tovare]

I'm in a similart situation, but in my case I cannot delete the contact from GAD because the history is freaking huge.

To me It appears that the SQL will need to encompass

  Contact
  ContactAttributes
  ContactAttributesData
  Document
  EmailIn
  EmailOut
  FieldCode
  FieldValue
  interaction

.... and maybe more. It's strange that there isn't any administration tools that we can use.