Question

Normaly i would do a delete * from XXX but on this table thats very slow, it normaly has about 500k to 1m rows in it ( one is a varbinary(MAX) if that mathers ).

Basicly im wondering if there is a quick way to emty the table of all content, its actualy quicker to drop and recreate it then to delete the content via the delete sql statement

The reason i dont want to recreate the table is because its heavly used and delete/recreate i assume will destroy indexs and stats gathered by sql server

Im also hoping there is a way to do this because there is a “clever” way to get row count via sys.sysindexes , so im hoping there is a equaly clever way to delete content

Answer 1

Truncate table is faster than delete * from XXX. Delete is slow because it works one row at a time. There are a few situations where truncate doesn’t work, which you can read about on MSDN.