The federation connector requires the ability to delete all children of a parent node without knowing (or caring) which are the children. Adding a new DeleteChildrenRequest would allow this to be easily done, and RequestProcessor can even implement the process(DeleteChildrenRequest) method by reading the children and issuing a delete for each child. Although connectors would not need to know about or implement this operation, several connectors (including the JPA connector) probably should implement it anyway, because they could very efficiently do the work in one step.