We have a list of nearly 20k DE's that was created over the last 8-9 years. We would like to keep only those DE's in our SFMC Account where records got added in the past one year and anything beyond that we would like to delete those De's
Any quick way to find out the latest entry of a record for all those DE' s since manually verifying it will be quite time consuming?
Hi Anirudh,
For ~20K Data Extensions, manually checking each DE isn't practical. One option is to automate the inventory using the SFMC REST/SOAP APIs.
However, SFMC doesn't provide a simple standard field on the Data Extension definition that represents the latest record insertion date. You would need to determine that from the data itself (for example, if the DEs contain a CreatedDate/EntryDate field) or from the process that populates them.
If your DEs have a consistent date field, you could build an automation/script that:
- Retrieves the list of Data Extensions through the API.
- For each DE, determines the latest relevant date from the data.
- Compares that date with your one-year cutoff.
- Produces a report of DEs that haven't received data in the last year.
- After reviewing the report, delete the obsolete DEs through the API.
I would recommend generating the report first rather than automatically deleting 20K DEs, so you can validate the results before performing the cleanup.
If the DEs don't have a consistent date/inserted timestamp field, please share how the records are loaded into them (Automation Studio, Journey Builder, API, imports, etc.). That will determine the best way to identify the last activity.
