• On first reading I thought your delete was taking over half an hour - so TRUNCATE may be an answer instead of DELETE * for a particularly large table.

    However I'm guessing you really mean you want to delete records older than half an hour, in which case you'll need something like this

    DELETE FROM table

    WHERE dateColumn < DATEADD(mi, -30, GetDate())

    you will need a suitable dateColumn containing the records creation time