Can I or how to delete a Cadence workflow domain?

Question

I incidentally created a wrong domain, or after some testing I wanted to delete the domain. Should I do that? and How?

Answer 1

It's strongly recommended not to delete domain.

There could be some data like tasks associated with a domain in the Cadence system. There is no tooling to clean them yet. Simply delete the domain will lead to corruption. For example, there may be a timer task scheduled for 1 year later in that domain. If the domain is deleted, it may look okay right now. But one year later, when the timer fire, the system will be corrupted. By design Cadence needs to be strongly consistent. So the server cannot simply skip a timer task.

In most cases, you don't need to delete an existing domain. As long as you don't use it you are fine. Including cases like you created a domain with a wrong name, or you want to deprecate a domain. In those cases, just don't bother it.

Another case, you created a local domain but later on realized that it should be a global domain. It's recommended to just ignore the local domain.

There could some slightly better reasons to delete a domain. For example, in the above case, you want to keep using the same domain name for whatever reason.

!!Danger Zone!!

The ONLY case that you can delete a domain is the case that you are sure the domain has never been used at all.

The operation is as follow. Using your database tool:

For SQL:

DELETE FROM  domains WHERE name ="<yourDomain>" LIMIT 1

For Cassandra:

SELECT domain  FROM domains_by_name_v2 WHERE domains_partition=0 AND name ="<yourDomain>"

This will return the domainUUID.

Then delete the records from two table:

DELETE FROM domains_by_name_v2 WHERE domains_partition=1 AND name ="<yourDomain>" LIMIT 1;

DELETE FROM domains WHERE id = domainUUID LIMIT 1;