I have about 10 tables with over 2 million records and one with 30 million. I would like to efficiently remove older data from each of these tables. My general algorithm is: create a temp table for each large table and populate it with newer data truncate the original tables copy tmp data back to original tables using: "insert into originaltable (select * from tmp_table)" However, the last step of copying the data back is taking longer than I'd like. I thought about deleting the original tables and making the temp tables "permanent", but I lose constraint/foreign key info. If I delete from the tables directly, it takes much longer. Given that I need to preserve all foreign keys and constraints, are there any faster ways of removing the older data? Thanks.