Reminds me of this old post about deleting large amounts of data efficiently at MySpace. Page has now gone but was archived.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090525233504/http://blogs.msdn...

Brent Ozar talked about this back in 2008 in reference to working with large tables in MSSQL Server:

https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2018/04/how-to-delete-just...