I did the following to empty ldf: 1. Put the recovery mode to simple; 2. dbcc shrinkdatabase('database_name')

This made the ldf to minimum from 99GB down to 1M

I then tried to delete redundant records in one of the problematic table that has 25877065 records, apparently my command is wrong:

delete table where id > 20877065

the ldf file gets increased immediately and dramatically to GB level and the query is still running. I don't know if it would fail again due to running out of space. Should I continue waiting or should I terminate it?

And how to remove those redundant records?

Thanks.