I’m bloggin this because I’ll need it in a few weeks….
Michael Campbell has blogged about removing data from a table in chunks http://sqladvice.com/blogs/repeatableread/archive/2005/09/20/12795.aspx. This can be simplified even further in SQL Server 2005
DELETE TOP (2000) FROM MyBigTableWHERE someCondition = true ORDER BY Dateolumn ASC