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Purging Data from a Large Table in SQL Server

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.

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Question of the Day

The Long Name

I run this code to create a table:Create table with unicode nameWhen I check the length, I get these results:Table with length of name shown as 132 charactersA table name is limited to 128 characters. How does this work?

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