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Status Future consideration
Created by Guest
Created on Nov 11, 2025

Add options to the cleanup tool to permanently delete all versions of specific artifacts

Currently, the cleanup tool (/v1/DBAdmin/cleanup REST API) helps reduce the database size when you have multiple versions of specific artifacts (such as DT or Test Suite).

However the latest version and the original version remains in the database and can be restore from the timeline.

This brings two issues:

1) if a customer needs to delete a specific artifacts for legal reason (such as a GDPR request to delete some phone number that are saved in the DTs...) he cannot.

2) if a customer has only one or 2 versions for his huge DTs or his huge Test Suite, the tool does not help recover database space.

Accordingly, an improvement to the tool, such as the ability to flag the artifact for COMPLETE cleanup (for instance when you look at your deleted objects in the Recycle Bin) would be helpful.
Set the flag to true and when this is the case, the cleanup tool will complete delete the artifact (including the latest versions) if it means the criteria in the cleanup...

Idea priority Low
  • Guest
    Jan 29, 2026

    We would like to share the issues the customer is currently facing.

    The customer operates in a way that requires creating a test suite each time tests are executed on the main branch, which is used permanently. Because they cannot delete past test suites, unnecessary disk usage continues to increase.

    The customer clearly regards the inability to delete unnecessary data as a "defect" and is requesting a prompt improvement.

  • Admin
    Antony Viaud
    Jan 21, 2026

    As for the second point, the cleanup tool does recover database space, but there are requirements:

    • The deleted versions must be older than the specified archived date.

    • They must not be used in any branch or snapshot.

  • Admin
    Antony Viaud
    Jan 21, 2026

    Comments from the dev team:

    Regarding your first point about deleting specific artifacts for legal reasons (such as a GDPR request to delete phone numbers stored in DTs), this is handled by the /v1/DBAdmin/{id}/wipe endpoint in Swagger UI.

    However, the wipe tool can be used for this specific purpose—it immediately frees up disk space by removing version information for certain elements. Currently, it supports the following attributes:

    • brm.Definition.body

    • brm.ProjectElement.documentation

    • versionComment

    We could update this tool to handle the test-suite attribute used to store the excel file, in the future.

  • Guest
    Jan 21, 2026

    Note that the customer also mentioned that deleting with recyclebinMode=false does nothing if he has only one version for his test suite (which is his standard use case). 
    So basically, if he creates 1000 new test suites in a specific branch (no subbranch), delete them all, he has no methodology to clean up the corresponding space in the DB. 

    Even if he runs the tool to remove all references to them in the recycleBin by running the cleanup tool with recyclebinMode=true. 
    So he has thousands of phantom test suite, in a branch with no sub-branch, that are not visible anywhere, but takes huge space in the DB. 

  • Guest
    Jan 8, 2026

    Let me add to this idea:
    In his use case, my customer got space errors in his DB2 server. 
    The DC Database was at 48GB

    He deleted lots of Test Suites. 

    Running the cleanup tool with recyclebinMode=true will only delete references to deleted items and will not reclaim database size. He ends up with 10xGB of data in VTCRESOURCE for data that are referenced by nothing visible in DC (including in the recycle bin). What is the purpose of keeping those data if it is not used in DC and is taking huge space (several GB) in the DB ???

    Running the cleanup tool with recyclebinMode=false will also remove non-deleted items (intermediate versions) and this is not acceptable. For instance, customers can have published test suites in public branches for which he needs to keep track of all the changes for auditing purposes (always the case for Insurance and/or Financial companies, you cannot delete stuff easily when it has been published, you need to keep a track record of changes over time), and other test suites in private branches for the developers internal testing purposes that can be deleted.

    Even if this is not part of the cleanup tool, a methodology or tool is needed to remove in the DC DB (or at least replace the content in the column storing the xlsx data by small dummy data to mitigate the space issue) for deleted Test Suite that are not anymore reference in the Recycle bin or in the timeline.