Deleting all devices from Zenoss with zendmd

We upgraded our Zenoss 2.3.3 installation to 2.5.2 in a test environment, but wanted to retain only a few of the hundreds of devices that were monitored by the system. We tried deleting these from the web UI, but it would not complete--it always timed out and never seemed to delete anything. I then turned to a zendmd script, which worked wonders:

for dev in dmd.Devices.getSubDevices():
  print dev.id
  dev.deleteDevice()
commit()
reindex()
commit()

This ran quickly and took out all of our devices. We then added back in the ones we wanted. Note: this does not delete performance graphs or events for the affected devices, so you can add them back in and still have this information available.