I had been keeping an eye on our Storage Quota and suddenly noticed that we had passed 100%. We don’t store documents on our Salesforce instance — just object data, most of which is imported from our legacy system. Unfortunately, this had been filling up and we exceeded our 1GB quote (20 users).

First, I used Mass Update Anything (available for both Mac and Windows) with a query to find some old data records. I could then delete those records and re-query. Unfortunately, it only processes about 1000 records at a time.

Then, I saw a Custom Object that I could do without. It was taking 80MB, so I deleted the object. Unfortunately, the 80MB remained allocated — perhaps because the Recycle Bin only empties after 30 days, but I’m not sure. Also, Mass Update Anything didn’t like querying that object, so I was stuck.

Then I remembered a post I had read that morning from MK Partners about using the Salesforce System Log window to mass-update some data. Matt had written some quick Apex that executes in the System Log window. So, I modified it to do a mass delete.

Two points to note:

• The SELECT statement can only return 1000 records, lest you receive the error “System.QueryException: Inline query has too many rows for direct assignment, use FOR loop“
• The whole Apex block can only use 10,000 query rows (hence the 10x loop)

So, I had to run it a few times to delete all my records. It all worked very well.

Oh, one more point. When a custom object is deleted and brought back to life, it gets renamed (eg my_obj_del__c), so take a look at the object page to find the correct API name.

The Bottom Line

• Apex can execute in the System Log window
• Apex governor limits can be mostly avoided
• It pays to read blogs!