The other thing you should consider is using TRUNCATE instead of an un-filtered DELETE. It will both be much faster to perform and won't leave any dead rows behind.
Yep, but it does take an ACCESS EXCLUSIVE lock. We want the old table contents to be readable to other sessions while the new table contents are being populated (which can take quite a while), hence we don't use TRUNCATE.
Best of both worlds is to just populate a new table, flip over to that when it's ready, and drop the old one once nobody's referring to it anymore. That way we don't pay the DELETE scan penalty and don't leave dead rows, and also don't lock reads out while we repopulate.
