Why Large Bulk Deletes May Not Complete

When you select a large number of records in a view and delete them, TrackVia does considerably more work behind the scenes than just removing rows. Depending on your table's setup, a bulk delete can involve:

1. Updating any parent records with Triggered Fields that aggregate data from the deleted children (e.g., a Sum or Count that includes the deleted records), so those values stay accurate.
2. Updating any child records to reflect that their parent record no longer exists.
3. Marking any documents or images attached to the deleted records for deletion.

All of this happens as part of a single transaction. If your table (or a related table) has ongoing traffic at the same time, that traffic can cause locking and contention with the delete transaction — and the larger the batch of records being deleted, the more likely that transaction is to time out before it finishes. When that happens, the delete can appear to simply hang, with no error message and no indication of progress.

One exception: if the table has an "on delete" App Script, bulk delete switches to removing records one at a time instead of as a single batch transaction — which avoids this specific timeout mechanism, but is slower overall for large volumes.

Practical guidance

• Stick to 1,000 records or fewer per delete operation. This lines up with the in-app warning shown when you select more than 1,000 records, and reflects a volume that reliably completes.
• If you need to delete tens of thousands of records (for example, archiving a year or more of historical data), break the work into batches of 1,000 or fewer, and space them out rather than running them back-to-back — especially if the table has related tables with active traffic.
• If a delete does hang with no error, don't assume it eventually completed — refresh the view and check whether the records are still present before retrying.