SQL Batched Delete

Question

I have a table in SQL Server 2005 which has approx 4 billion rows in it. I need to delete approximately 2 billion of these rows. If I try and do it in a single transaction, th

Answer 1

The short answer is, you can't delete 2 billion rows without incurring some kind of major database downtime.

Your best option may be to copy the data to a temp table and truncate the original table, but this will fill your tempDB and would use no less logging than deleting the data.

You will need to delete as many rows as you can until the transaction log fills up, then truncate it each time. The answer provided by Stanislav Kniazev could be modified to do this by increasing the batch size and adding a call to truncate the log file.