If I stop a long running query, does it rollback?

Question

A query that is used to loop through 17 millions records to remove duplicates has been running now for about 16 hours and I wanted to know if the query is sto

Answer 1

Your query is not wrapped in a transaction, so it won't rollback the changes already made by the individual delete statements.

I specifically tested this myself on my own SQL Server using the following query, and the ApplicationLog table was empty even though I cancelled the query:

declare @count int
select @count = 5
WHILE @count > 0
BEGIN
  print @count
  delete from applicationlog;
  waitfor time '20:00';
  select @count = @count -1
END

However your query is likely to take many days or weeks, much longer then 15 hours. Your estimate that you can process 2000 records every 6 seconds is wrong because each iteration in your while loop will take significantly longer with 17 million rows then it does with 2000 rows. So unless your query takes significantly less then a second for 2000 rows, it will take days for all 17 million.

You should ask a new question on how you can delete duplicate rows efficiently.