Ok @GrahamWood-HWC  - I'm glad that you were able to delete your item from the portal's sharing content using the 'delete' method, and then that item deleted from from the portal gwdb. Hopefully that will work for most..

But the reason I posted up the gwdb method was because I could not delete my orphaned items from the sharing content.  They simply were not found in at any sharing endpoint for portal or server, but still showed as an item in the portal.  The only way to remove the orphaned items was by using the -c "DELETE FROM  command against the gwdb.

Yep i had the same behaviour. the item wasn't in portal rest sharing content but it was in the db I had the old itemid from the portal logs but couldn't find it via substituting into a bunch of urls I formed from other portal items on the rest sharing format..

once I queried this gw_items I found it with a different id.

anyways thanks for this it got me out of having redundant items in the db..