Permanently delete dropped table (Unity Catalog)

[scrimpton]

The recommendation before dropping a table is to do a DELETE then VACUUM RETENTION 0 (recommended in DEV).

If you DROP the table without doing a DELETE|VACUUM, your table will be soft deleted with your entire data (permanently deletedin 30 days) and you cannot do a VACUUM anymore.

In such cases, can I safely delete those soft deleted table folders straight from my storage given that these tables will not be used anymore? I want to do a cleanup in my storage and save cost.

[Kaniz · Accepted solution]

Hi @scrimpton, you can manually delete the soft-deleted table folders from your storage. When you drop a table, only the metadata is removed immediately. The underlying data is deleted asynchronously, and it is permanently deleted after 30 days (known as GDPR deletion). However, if you need to clean up your storage and save costs, you can manually delete the data file stored in the table's path.