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Purging Data from a Large Table in SQL Server

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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

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Question of the Day

The String Distance I

In SQL Server 2025, what is returned by this code: 

SELECT EDIT_DISTANCE('Steve', 'Stan')
Assume preview features are enabled.

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