Question

Trying to get a definitive answer on whether it’s possible to limit a delete_all to X number of records.

I’m trying the following:

Model.where(:account_id => account).order(:id).limit(1000).delete_all

but it doesn’t seem to respect the limit and instead just deletes all Model where :account_id => account.

I would expect it to generate the following:

delete from model where account_id = ? order by id limit 1000

This seems to work fine when using destroy_all but I want to delete in bulk.

Answer 1

ActiveRecord::Base.connection.send(:delete_sql,'delete from table where account_id = <account_id> limit 1000')

You have to use send because ‘delete_sql’ is protected, but this works.

I found that removing the ‘order by’ significantly sped it up too.

I do think it’s weird that using .limit works with destroy_all but not delete_all