Hi david.gerard,

the idea is that it can be much better to delete in batches when handling a much larger data set than in the example. Imagine you have to do a delete of 5 million entries in a 20 million entry table that is in a production system. You would have some (necessary) blocking which could seriously slow down your production system.

As a note to Ted Pin - Why is the variable @cnt a decimal and not integer? You cannot get 2.5 rows back with your count(*) query.

Also, would this not be even better using a numbers table á la Jeff Moden http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/TSQL/62867/ ?

Regards

GermanDBA