Is there a way to limit the number of records for DeleteEntitiesDirectly? I need to break the delete operation into chunks and repeat until no records remain. In SQL Server this would be

delete top(1000) tablename ...

and then repeat while @@rowcount>0

I don't see a way to do this with DataAccessAdapter.DeleteEntitiesDirectly. Do I need to fetch PK fields in batches and then delete using the PKs?

You can fetch the PKs as you said and filter the delete on chunks of them. But, why do you want to break the delete into chunks?

I want to break it in chunks because there can be tens of millions of records that need to get deleted and there are problems with locks and timeouts if the code tries to do it all at once (other parts of the application are trying to use the tables while the deletions are being processed). Breaking it into pieces seemed the simplest solution.

Then it's the way you described, unless you want to drop the table and recreate it.

Thank you.

You could formulate the top query using a select in the predicate (using a fieldcompareset predicate), however it still will be slow. If you want to remove all rows in the table, it might be better to use TRUNCATE using a plain sql query.