Tutorial: Building with CleaveDB

Hard Delete (INCINERATE)

When records must be permanently obliterated—such as fulfilling GDPR/CCPA privacy deletion requests, pruning stale metrics, or purging the rubbish bin to reclaim disk space—CleaveQL provides the INCINERATE command.

Permanently delete a document

To permanently destroy a record directly from a bucket:

INCINERATE users "jane"

This purges Jane's record from the storage engine's B+Tree, Write-Ahead Log (WAL), and memory cache. It cannot be salvaged or recovered.

Purging the rubbish bin

Rather than keeping soft-deleted documents indefinitely, automated maintenance jobs or administrators can incinerate records that have passed their retention period:

INCINERATE FROM _rubbish WHERE deleted_at < 1700000000

This frees disk space occupied by aged documents while preserving recently drained records for active recovery windows.

Permanently removing graph edges

When a document is incinerated, all incoming and outgoing graph bonds attached to that document are permanently severed from the database graph. The pointers are purged from memory, ensuring complete structural integrity.