Deleting a SharePoint site does not delete data from content database

Question

If I delete a SharePoint site collection, the entries for its documents are not deleted from the alldocs, alldocstreams and alldocversions table of content database.

I thought, when a site collection is deleted, all its data is permanently deleted from the database. Is there anything that I am missing about it?

Answer 1

When you delete a site collection the pointer in dbo.SiteMap in the config database is deleted, and the entry in dbo.Sites is deleted from the content database. The site collection is now gone from the user's perspective, although if you go into the databases (which is discouraged) the content is still there - for the time being.

The Gradual Site Delete timer job runs daily (by default) and will gradually delete all the data for the site collection in small batches to avoid lock escalation. If you must poke around, it will be queued in dbo.SiteDeletion.