When I upgraded to SDE 9.2 on SQL 2000 the DeleteFeatures_management geoprocessing tool would immediately delete all records at one time in a feature class. So total time about 2 seconds. Now I find that on SDE 9.3.1 it's gone back to the pre 9.2 behavior of deleting 1 record at a time. What happened. I changed my python script from pointing to a 9.2 SDE database to my new 9.3.1 and it has gone from 2 seconds to several hours for the deletefeatures command on a 1 million plus row feature class.
if row.feattype == "table":
gp.Deleterows_management(targetLayer)
else:
gp.DeleteFeatures_management(targetLayer)
