Delete a Keyspace

Although adding a keyspace is implicit, deleting one is not. In order to delete a keyspace, you must first bring down all tablets on that keyspace.

Following this, you should delete all shards of a keyspace. In the current example, commerce has only one shard (0). You can use the following command to delete it:

vtctldclient DeleteShards --recursive commerce/0

The recursive flag is required to ensure that the shard is deleted from all cells. If there are tablets still running against the shard, the command will fail.

You can add an --even_if_serving flag to ignore running tablets, but it is not recommended. Otherwise, this would cause existing vttablets to get confused about their tablet records being deleted.

If a keyspace has more than one shard, you may pass multiple shard names to DeleteShards. They will be deleted sequentially; if one deletion fails, the operation stops there.

Deleting a shard also deletes the metadata for all the backups, but it does not delete the backups themselves. This is something you have to do manually.

Once all shards are deleted, you can delete the keyspace with:

vtctldclient DeleteKeyspace commerce

DeleteKeyspace also supports a --recursive flag that loops through all shards and deletes them recursively, but also ignores any tablets that are running. Note that restarting a vttablet for the deleted keyspace will cause the keyspace to be recreated. This is yet another reason for ensuring that all vttablets are shutdown upfront.