Dapi ;

use of cursors for deletion is bad idea.it degrades the performance even more. & more ever u want to commit tran afer 50000 records...that is prone to SNAPSHOT too old as suggested by JMODIC.

i think deletion using rownum & looping is , i can say, better than using cursors.

If number of records in table that needs deletion is more than what it has to retain after deletion than better go for som TEMP table insertion of data that u want to retain.....truncate current table & insert back the records from TEMP table....

Abhay.