It has been almost three years since there is feedback to implement a Hard-Delete policy for Azure Search indexers. https://feedback.azure.com/forums/263029-azure-search/suggestions/33939013-adding-hard-delete-policy-to-all-of-indexer Has there been any development to this? I am sure this will be requested by a lot of users. If we can't have this feature anytime soon and if we can't implement Soft-delete in our applications, are there any alternatives/ideas we can try?
There's currently no hard delete policy for indexers. For blob indexers you may be able to use the native blob soft delete policy, which requires enabling "Blob soft delete" on the storage account so you don't have to manage the soft delete metadata.
For other data source types, one alternative is to use the REST API to directly remove documents from the index when they get removed from the data source, and synchronize them externally.