Thread: Deleting old categories and products

We have a mess of soft deleted and unpublished products and categories left over from when we initially setup our site. I am doing some data validation queries in the tables and would like to clean out the junk. Are there any problems with deleting unpublished and soft deleted categories directly from SQL Management Studio Express? Thanks.

Checck this thread. I used the code below this week andit worked. We then imported the products to clean tables.

showthread.php?t=17527&highlight=delete ------------------------------------------
To do this, run the following SQL statements against your store database. This removes these products for good, there is no recovering them! Be sure you have a good backup first.

DELETE FROM Product
DELETE FROM ProductAffiliate
DELETE FROM ProductCategory
DELETE FROM ProductCustomerLevel
DELETE FROM ProductDistributor
DELETE FROM ProductGenre
DELETE FROM ProductLocaleSetting
DELETE FROM ProductManufacturer
DELETE FROM ProductSection
DELETE FROM ProductVariant
DELETE FROM ProductVector
DELETE FROM ShippingByProduct

Actually, using TRUNCATE TABLE tablename, both removes all data and resets the identity counter to the seed at the same time.

It is faster than a delete statement which removes one row at a time, and the deletes are recorded in the transaction log.