T-SQL

External Article

Purging Data from a Large Table in SQL Server

  • Article

Purging data from a table is a common database maintenance task to prevent it from growing too large or to stay in compliance with data retention. When dealing with small amounts of data, this can be accomplished by a simple delete with no issues; however, with larger tables, this task can be problematic. Deleting records requires a lock that can block other processes from writing or even reading the data (depending on your isolation level). In this article I will share a technique I have used to work with some very large tables.

2025-06-04

Blogs

SQL Server instance metadata inventory with PowerShell and SMO

By

SQL Server instance metadata inventory with PowerShell and SMO The purpose...

5 SQL Tricks Worth Remembering Before You Close the Laptop

By

Disclosure: this post may contain links to books as an affiliate link. If you...

Claude Context Window

By

Every Claude conversation has a context window. It is the total amount of text...

Read the latest Blogs

Forums

Celebrating 30 years of PostgreSQL, A Thank you message

By Pat Wright

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Celebrating 30 years of PostgreSQL,...

provisioning sql server via VMware Cloud Foundation

By andreas.kreuzberg

Hello, has anyone here ever provisioned and actually used an MS SQL Server with...

No More Deadlocks

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item No More Deadlocks

Visit the forum

Question of the Day

No More Deadlocks

After detecting deadlocks in SQL Server 2025 and lowering the time threshold for detecting future issues, when does the Database Engine return to the 5s default interval?

See possible answers