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

If your machine doesn't have very advanced hardware then it may take sql server a very long time to complete that command. I don't know for sure how this operation is performed under the hood but based on my experience this could be done more efficiently by bringing the records out of the database and into memory for a program that uses a tree structure with a remove duplicate rule for insertion. Try reading the entirety of the table in chuncks (say 10000 rows at a time) into a C++ program using ODBC. Once in the C++ program use and std::map where key is the unique key and struct is a struct that holds the rest of the data in variables. Loop over all the records and perform insertion into the map. The map insert function will handle removing the duplicates. Since search inside a map is lg(n) time far less time to find duplicates than using your while loop. You can then delete the entire table and add the tuples back into the database from the map by forming insert queries and executing them via odbc or building a text file script and running it in management studio.