ngreene (12/28/2012)

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If the primary key is an identity and its the clustered index, you could loop through and update records 1 at a time. Each update the where clause would = <identity number>. This would cause SQL to take a row level lock rather than a page or table lock. Row locks likely would not be noticed by users. It is less efficient to update 1 row at a time, but it will be faster than you think and the impact will be non-existent.

Also, if you change recovery mode to simple make sure and perform a full backup after the job is complete and you have switched it back to full recovery mode.

If it was me and i had the disk space, i would create a duplicate table and then use sp_rename to bring the new table online. Down time would be <1 second