Remove lines of a table

Baserow Help
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Is there a way to clear off a table?
I use Baserow for logging and have literally millions of lines in these logs and it is wasting space and bloating my Postgres. How do I clear a table?

Like… it would be really awesome to set a filter like Date before and just remove everything on that table older than a month! Or even just clear the whole table… I don’t care. But it would be really annoying if I have to make a new table every month just because i wanted to delete a million lines.

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Hi,

@olgatrykush is checking if batch delete is possible.

But with millions of lines this will still be a lot of work. A secure empty table option would be a good idea.

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Hi @roofboard, I’m Peter (another one! :slight_smile: ), a full-stack dev at Baserow.

The problem you’re facing is definitely something we’re aware of, and in the future, we’d like to make the process a little easier to manage from within the UI. Two ideas we have are:

  1. The ability to “select all” (visible) rows, allowing more rows to be deleted at once.
  2. The ability to truncate a whole table, clearing it of all of its rows.

Unfortunately at the moment we have neither, but I can suggest three ideas you could try today:

  1. You say you’re logging millions of rows in your table, could you perhaps programmatically rotate tables when you reach a specific size? E.g. once your table reaches ~250K rows, create a new one using the API, and then write another ~250K rows?
  2. As @Peter and @olgatrykush suggested, you could look at using the batch_delete_database_table_rows endpoint, in chunks of ~1000 at a time.
  3. If you’re happy with emptying your table of rows, and you don’t mind losing the data, you could always issue a TRUNCATE on your table. Just be sure to backup your table if you do want to keep the data!

I hope this helps.

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Agree, the ability to truncate a table while you are developing a solution is pretty essential. Would like to see this as well. Thanks.

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Hi @picklepete
Been now almost 2 years since your post and still NO ability to multi delete rows!
Just started on baserow, but I see this as a show stopper!
What are your plans on this? Txs…

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Hello @miorcec,

It is currently possible to bulk delete rows. You can do so by selecting multiple rows, right-clicking, and then clicking on “Delete rows”.

This old topic refers to truncating a table, deleting all of its rows. This is not currently possible, but may be one day.

Cheers,
Peter Evans

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@picklepete
LOL - we are talking about a BASIC “drop” function of ANY DB!
I tried to delete with the “Delete rows” function as you are suggesting - but VERY keen to get your explanations on how I can “shift select” 25k rows!
ANY DB whether SQL / Airtable or nocoDB has such a function - you thoughts it was needed and a good idea… 2 years ago!
Why is it still not implemented? And will it ever be?

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Hello again @miorcec,

Thank you for the feedback, it’s much appreciated!

You are absolutely correct, it’s trivial in all RDMS to truncate a table. We have other considerations to take into account, however, when such a feature is prioritised at Baserow.

As this feature hasn’t been requested particularly often, it’s not very high on our priority list, but feel free to keep an eye on our roadmap for upcoming features and bug fixes!

Cheers,
Peter Evans

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By the way, try dragging and deleting multiple rows yourself. It is a total PITA because of the way scrolling works, and you can’t select more than maybe 100 rows at a time. Totally laborious and not worth the effort.