> I think a lot depends on how massive the deletion. If I need to keep a
> small percentage of records, I find that copying them to a temporary
> table (possibly external) and then dropping/recreating the original
> source table works very well. Dropping tables takes hardly any time.
>

The only thing to watch here is that you can only do it a finite
number of times because tables get internally numbered and the numbers
are not reused until you backup then restore. From memory, they are
only smallints, but someone more knowledgable can confirm.

This may be a non-issue, depending on the planned frequency of both
the drops and the backup-restore cycles.

Adam