bulk delete from database

[Mark_Ioffe]

hello. we have a few hundred leads deleted because customers have closed accounts and other reasons.  we have a custom field on the lead that represents our internal customer id.  is there a way we can pass a list of customer id's to marketo to delete them from the lead and associated custom objects?  i see we can pass the marketo id but that lives only in marketo-land.

thanks!

[Gerard_Donnell4]

Hi Mark,

It probably depends on the field type.

Try creating a smart list and then drag out the custom field. It should hopefully have a green plus sign to the right. If you click that a box appears where you can enter multiple values on separate lines. Copy and paste all your Customer ID's in there and hopefully that will create a smart list with all the people you need to delete.

[Mark_Ioffe]

Thank you for your prompt reply. Is there a way I can do it via API? Like pass the customer field as a list of id’s (1,2,3,4,5) etc.. and call /bulk/v1/leads.json?_method=DELETE on that csv containing the id’s?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Deletes are done with the Lead ID. You could use Get Leads (by Filter Type) and pass the results to Delete.

It wouldn't make sense for delete to key on a custom field, because deletes refer to a single lead at a time and your custom field (even if you try to keep it unique in userland) is not actually guaranteed unique.

[Nick_Wee]

Hello

Is there a way to pull more than 300 leads with an API call? What if we have say 1 million records we'd like to delete in bulk? 

[SanfordWhiteman]

It's not feasible to do mass deletes using only the API. You can upsert a large batch of leads (up to the bulk import max size of 10 MB) into a (static) List.

Then run a batch SC filtered on Member of List that deletes the leads.

However, note this does not allow deletion based on Lead Id unless you have a secondary field into which you copy the {{lead.id}} (call it something like Lead Id Mirror). One frustrating quirk of Marketo is that you can't act directly on Lead ID in a filter.