I have a table which has records that need to be periodically cleared according to a set of criteria.
I was expecting that I could use the criteria builder to just delet
From the User Guide about deleting objects:
Note that Grails does not supply a deleteAll method as deleting data is discouraged and can often be avoided through boolean flags/logic.
If you really need to batch delete data you can use the executeUpdate method to do batch DML statements:
Customer.executeUpdate("delete Customer c where c.name = :oldName", [oldName:"Fred"])