How to efficiently delete rows while NOT using Truncate Table in a 500,000+ rows table

Question

Let\'s say we have table Sales with 30 columns and 500,000 rows. I would like to delete 400,000 in the table (those where \"toDelete=\'1\'\").

Answer 1

My own take on this functionality would be as follows. This way there is no repeated code and you can manage your chunk size.

DECLARE @DeleteChunk INT = 10000
DECLARE @rowcount INT = 1

WHILE @rowcount > 0
BEGIN

  DELETE TOP (@DeleteChunk) FROM Sales WITH(ROWLOCK)

  SELECT @rowcount = @@RowCount
END