Access delete query bigger than 2GB

[mojo69]

Why would a delete query (deleting 200,000 records) throw an error telling me that the query is too large? I have some suspicions about the table that I am deleting from, but am wondering how the query could bloat up that much.

[techgnome]

When you delete a record it's not deleted immediately, but is marked as deleted and shuffled off to the log area... Meanwhile, any FKeys with Cascading Deletes are also dealt with... so depending on what you're deleting, the amount of what you're deleting, what is linked to that data, not to mention data related to the data related to the date you're deleting would also itself need to be deleted... it can get to the point where the volume of data exceeds what Access can handle.

-tg

[mojo69]

Thanks for the reply. With this table there are no Foreign Keys or cascading deletes. It did contain around 600000 records. The total database size was 300 mb. There are just two tables, with the one in question being the larger of the two. I have a backup that I am bringing back so I could retry the delete and it works about half the time. These tables have been giving me some trouble, that is why they are separated from the main database.