Jeff Mlakar shows how to insert, update, and delete large numbers of records with T-SQL:
Using T-SQL to insert, update, or delete large amounts of data from a table will results in some unexpected difficulties if you’ve never taken it to task.
Let’s say you have a table in which you want to delete millions of records. If the goal was to remove all then we could simply use TRUNCATE. However, if we want to remove records which meet some certain criteria then executing something like this will cause more trouble that it is worth.
I do like the delete process. The update process is going to run tableRows/batchSize full scans, so I’m not as fond of that one. Do read the whole thing.