Automated Process to delete "obsolete" objects

[Anon Anon]

I am pretty certain that someone (Brian?) has this type of process in place, but I can't find it - might have been posted on the old Yahoo User Forum.

I am looking for an automated process that will help me delete objects that aren't being used any more.

For our Production systems we monitor this / track this pretty closely, but we let the users follow-up and take action on deleting their objects.

However, for our QA system, we generally leave the users to their own devices, but this is starting to cause issues on the system because people are not deleting their old objects.  Sometimes it takes me 5-10 minutes to delete a folder / object.  For example, in one of our clients there are over 312,000+ objects.  I ran a query to identify any objects that were "created" over a year ago and have NEVER been executed - and i got back 186,000+ objects!!!

So clearly, I can't rely on my users to do their own cleanup.

I am looking for an automated process that actually deletes the objects that are found in this condition.  Ideally, there would be some kind of backup or export taken of the objects being deleted just in case we need to get it back, but the key point is - I can't have someone manually deleting 186,000 objects.  :-)

This is only QA so I am not too worried about fallout / problems, but if anyone else does anything like this I'd be curious to know:

• What criteria you use to identify the obsolete objects.
• If you run into any issues with objects in jobplans being deleted and other types of fallout from objects that reference the now deleted objects.

Any help would be appreciated.  Thanks.

[Anon Anon]

Laura:

We have similar issues and would also appreciate a more robust solution.  We currently rely on object statistics and Last used information.  So as you have identified, it's a rather labor intensive and error prone exercise to perform any type of cyclic cleanup.

I'm guessing a lot of SQL could be created to determine which objects could be deleted but I've just never had this as a high priority.  Even with the number of objects in our production system, about 200k, the tables are really not that big in the overall scheme of things.  This obviously ignores overhead of routine processing of obsolete objects.  The object deletion, using the REMOVE_OBJECT script function can get rid of the objects, the trick is generating the list of those objects.

I'm hopeful somebody already has a solution and will share it.  Perhaps this is something that Automic will step up and provide as part of the product.

Mark

[Anon Anon]

Laura:

I came across this while looking for something else,  http://www.automicblog.com/automicblog/obsolete-jobs/, and it can probably be used as a basis for my requirements and perhaps yours. 

There is a pile of SQL for accessing lots of tables and providing the information “hidden” therein.  My hat’s off to Philipp Elmer for providing such a wealth of code and techniques (and they are in English!).

Hope this helps,

Mark

[Rick Murray]

I know this is an old thread, but if I have the correct Brian in mind, Laura is correct us having a process to delete objects that were unused for the past XX time. 

We stopped running them about two years ago, but we did have them in place, and it would be real nice to have a new automated process.