This does not meet the goal. A row-by-row DELETE against the oldest month is not the lowest-impact way to purge data from a monthly partitioned table. Microsoft’s partitioning guidance specifically says partitioning lets you perform maintenance and retention operations more efficiently by targeting just the relevant partition, including the ability to truncate data in a single partition .

The proposed statement:

DELETE FROM dbo.Orders

WHERE OrderDate < DATEADD(month, -36, SYSUTCDATETIME());

would log row deletions and can hold locks longer, creating more overhead for other queries than a partition-level maintenance operation. Since the table is already partitioned by month , the expected low-impact approach is to operate on the oldest partition directly, not issue a broad delete predicate over rows. Microsoft explicitly highlights partition-targeted truncation as a faster, more efficient retention operation than working against the whole table or rowset.