I want to be able to physically delete a table and all of its data from ADX. (My retention policy is currently set to indefinite.)

There are a number of different ways to “delete” or “drop” data from ADX, but many of them are only a soft delete, leaving data in storage.

The .purge command is one option to physically remove data. I think the “.purge table allrecords” command could be a solution that would probably not come with the cost/performance implications when applying it to an entire table like it does when applying it to only a subset of records. (Interested to know if that is actually true or not – if .purge could be a good solution for physical deletion of an entire table.) But I’m not quite sure if I want to make the case for enabling the .purge command on a cluster, which I think is disabled by default.

That leaves me looking at the .drop extents command as a potential solution.
The question I have is whether the “.drop extents” command actually physically deletes data from underlying storage, or if it is another soft delete approach? The documentation around this seems to be lacking in clarity to me.