SQL Server Efficiently dropping a group of rows with millions and millions of rows

Question

I recently asked this question: MS SQL share identity seed amongst tables (Many people wondered why)

I have the following layout of a table:

Table: Star

Answer 1

This was the old technique in SQL 2000 , partitioned views and remains a valid option for SQL 2005. The problem does come in from having large quantity of tables and the maintenance overheads associated with them.

As you say, partitioning is an enterprise feature, but is designed for this large scale data removal / rolling window effect.

One other option would be running batched deletes to avoid creating 1 very large transaction, creating hundreds of far smaller transactions, to avoid lock escalations and keep each transaction small.