How to delete data from an RDBMS using Talend ELT jobs? - talend

Question

What is the best way to delete from a table using Talend?
I'm currently using a tELTJDBCoutput with the action on Delete.
It looks like Talend always generate a DELETE ... WHERE EXISTS (<your generated query>) query.
So I am wondering if we have to use the field values or just put a fixed value of 1 (even in only one field) in the tELTmap mapping.
To me, putting real values looks like it useless as in the where exists it only matters the Where clause.
Is there a better way to delete using ELT components?
My current job is set up like so:
The tELTMAP component with real data values looks like:
But I can also do the same thing with the following configuration:
Am I missing the reason why we should put something in the fields?

Answer 1

The following answer is a demonstration of how to perform deletes using ETL operations where the data is extracted from the database, read in to memory, transformed and then fed back into the database. After clarification, the OP specifically wants information around how this would differ for ELT operations
If you need to delete certain records from a table then you can use the normal database output components.
In the following example, the use case is to take some updated database and check to see which records are no longer in the new data set compared to the old data set and then delete the relevant rows in the old data set. This might be used for refreshing data from one live system to a non live system or some other usage case where you need to manually move data deltas from one database to another.
We set up our job like so:
Which has two tMySqlConnection components that connect to two different databases (potentially on different hosts), one containing our new data set and one containing our old data set.
We then select the relevant data from the old data set and inner join it using a tMap against the new data set, capturing any rejects from the inner join (rows that exist in the old data set but not in the new data set):
We are only interested in the key for the output as we will delete with a WHERE query on this unique key. Notice as well that the key has been selected for the id field. This needs to be done for updates and deletes.
And then we simply need to tell Talend to delete these rows from the relevant table by configuring our tMySqlOutput component properly:
Alternatively you can simply specify some constraint that would be used to delete the records as if you had built the DELETE statement manually. This can then be fed in as the key via a main link to your tMySqlOutput component.
For instance I might want to read in a CSV with a list of email addresses, first names and last names of people who are opting out of being contacted and then make all of these fields a key and connect this to the tMySqlOutput and Talend will generate a DELETE for every row that matches the email address, first name and last name of the records in the database.

Answer 2

In the first example shown in your question:
you are specifically only selecting (for the deletion) products where the SOME_TABLE.CODE_COUNTRY is equal to JS_OPP.CODE_COUNTRY and SOME_TABLE.FK_USER is equal to JS_OPP.FK_USER in your where clause and then the data you send to the delete statement is setting the CODE_COUNTRY equal to JS_OPP.CODE_COUNTRY and FK_USER equal to JS_OPP.CODE_COUNTRY.
If you were to put a tLogRow (or some other output) directly after your tELTxMap you would be presented with something that looks like:
.----------+---------.
| tLogRow_1 |
|=-----------+------=|
|CODE_COUNTRY|FK_USER|
|=-----------+------=|
|GBR |1 |
|GBR |2 |
|USA |3 |
'------------+-------'
In your second example:
You are setting CODE_COUNTRY to an integer of 1 (your database will then translate this to a VARCHAR "1"). This would then mean the output from the component would instead look like:
.------------.
|tLogRow_1 |
|=-----------|
|CODE_COUNTRY|
|=-----------|
|1 |
|1 |
|1 |
'------------'
In your use case this would mean that the deletion should only delete the rows where the CODE_COUNTRY is equal to "1".
You might want to test this a bit further though because the ELT components are sometimes a little less straightforward than they seem to be.