I've got a table (Sybase, Transact) with a few hundred thousand records in it and desire to remove records older than say three months. What I think is a good way is to let the SQL server do the work.

If you are allowed, create a stored procedure to do this, otherwise I think it can be done via one prepare/execute statement in perl.

Create a temp table #t1 and select into #t1 the records you want to _keep_.

Truncate the original table.

Select into the original table * from #t1.

The delete-from-execute method will create a transaction for each record. If you have it in some form of a loop, it'll only get worse and you may find your transaction log getting full. Truncate will trunc in one transaction, iirc.