Soft delete

In the Ultra Transcenders books

AZ-305AZ-104AI-200SC-900SC-300AZ-802DP-700

Each book explains Soft delete in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.

Related terms

• Deletion vectors

  Lets Delta Lake and Iceberg tables flag removed or changed rows through metadata rather than rewriting complete Parquet files, a soft delete that speeds up deletes, updates and merges. The physical rewrite happens later, when OPTIMIZE or a REORG TABLE purge runs.

• Key Vault Purge Operator

  A Key Vault RBAC role that can remove soft-deleted vaults for good. Purging follows soft delete as the final step.

• Point-in-time restore

  Lets you wind block blobs in a general-purpose v2 account back to how they were at an earlier moment. Before it works, soft delete, blob versioning and the change feed all have to be on.

• Purge protection

  Once switched on, this Key Vault option cannot be turned off; it prevents the vault or its objects being permanently deleted until the soft-delete retention period has elapsed, and needs soft delete enabled.

• Recovery Services vault

  Where Azure Backup and Site Recovery keep their data; it offers soft delete, immutability and multi-user authorisation, but is the wrong choice for cheaply archiving files you already have.