how to set up a pre query for sde database

Hi @Brad Nesom​! I believe you're on the right track with your workflow ideas so far. Is it feasible to run one job per feature class, and delete the features of interest on that basis? This would likely involve the Automations Writer, but you'd want to be conscious of the number of jobs this would generate (based the number of feature classes in your SDE). To make this process as efficient as possible, you'll likely want to use the SQLExecutor so that the database is doing the bulk of the work and FME Server is simply "submitting requests" for these deletes. GROUP BY and WHERE clauses can help narrow down the queries so you aren't reading excessive amounts of data per job. You may also be able to use attributes/parameters in the SQL queries to automatically fill table info for the feature class you want to clean up for that job.

for some strange reason the sqlexecutor is not working. it completes successfully (i don't get any indication of an error) but the log shows 0 features and when i look at sde the features still exist. I also tried the sde writer directly as well as the databaseupdater but none of the 3 are actually deleting the features.

Hi Brad, sorry for the delayed response! The SQLExecutor succeeding but not returning anything is expected when running statements like DELETE or DROP TABLE, because these queries aren't designed to return any results. To check why the features aren't being deleted, it may be an issue with a WHERE clause in your SQL. Both the SQLExector and DatabaseDeleter should work.