how to purge the soft-deleted schema and tables manually? Quota limited exceeded...

[woodymo]

got quota exceeded error. I have deleted 150 tables and related schemas, and it shows only 350 tables, but it seems the tables in catalog have 7-days retention. is there any way to purge the soft-deleted tables immediately? 

[RequestId=595819c3-ad31-463e-92e6-fd683398862f ErrorClass=QUOTA EXCEEDED. UC RES0URCE _0U0TA_EXCEEDED] Cannot create 1 Table(s) in Metastore e61252b0-8f27-427b-b356-f717deoc2515 (estimated count:504,limit: 500).

[Ashwin_DSA]

Hi @woodymo,

Dropped Unity Catalog tables remain recoverable with UNDROP for roughly 7 days, and SHOW TABLES DROPPED lists dropped tables that are still within that retention window. This is expected behaviour as per the documentation.

For the actual delete path, the public docs say DROP TABLE deletes tables within 7 to 30 days, and after the recovery window, the underlying data is marked for deletion during regular maintenance operations rather than being purged immediately.

So, based on the current public documentation, there does not appear to be a documented self-serve/public command to immediately purge an already soft-deleted Unity Catalog table or schema. If the metastore quota is still blocking new table creation even after cleanup, the practical next step is to open a Databricks support case and include the metastore ID and the exact QUOTA_EXCEEDED error.

For future workflows, if the pattern is "drop and recreate the same table name," Databricks recommends using CREATE OR REPLACE TABLE instead of DROP TABLE + CREATE TABLE, because drop/recreate can lead to unexpected results in production pipelines and concurrent operations.

Hope this helps.

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