Delete De

Move a Data Extension to Trash (soft-delete) by default — reversible.

A DELETE now stamps deleted_at / deleted_by and leaves the row (and all its data) intact, so the DE drops out of every active view (lists, pickers, send/journey audience resolution) but is restorable from the Trash. This is the recycle-bin pattern Assets / Content Blocks pioneered.

Soft-delete-vs-dependents policy (WARN-BUT-ALLOW): because the trash is reversible we do NOT block the soft-delete on where-used. We still surface the dependent list as informational. The no-broken-send safety rule lives in the send/journey resolution, which treats a trashed DE as unavailable and fails that send safely rather than sending blank.

Pass ?purge=true to permanently drop the row (the old irreversible hard delete). Purge is gated by the where-used check + force=true (refuses with 409 when other objects still reference the DE unless forced) and requires the DE to be in Trash first.

What a forced purge does to the dependents is decided by the FK policies, not by this function: the DE's own data (rows, fields), its relationships, filtered DEs and send audience sources CASCADE away with it, while the audience pointers on Sends, SendDefinitions, JourneyEntrySources, DynamicContentRules and SmartCaptureForms are SET NULL — those objects survive with no audience and fail closed rather than resolving a dead table. Note where that failure lands for a SendDefinition: launching the definition still produces an audience-less draft Send (the launch route only validates an audience it can see, and there is none); it is the Send's own launch validation that then refuses with "No audience selected.". There is no fallback to a default or to all contacts at any point. Keep any new FK into data_extensions declaring an explicit ondelete; one left at NO ACTION makes forced purge raise ForeignKeyViolation instead of completing (see migration 148).