Need to cleardown a table due to disk space problems

I need to delete about 3 million rows from a table that is part of a merge
publication. I think that I will have to copy out the rows that I want to
keep into a temp table and truncate the table and then copy the rows back in.
My question is how best to go about this? I think that the best way is to go
into the publication properties and uncheck the table on the articles tab.
Then to carry out the same process of copying out the data to be kept,
truncate the table, then move the rows to be kept back in. Then add the
article back into the publication. In order for the article to replicated
after adding it back in would I have to do a snapshot or would it resume by
itself?
Russell,
this sounds OK. However if the publication already has a subscription, you
won't be able to remove the individual article and you'll have to drop the
entire subscription before proceeding. You could drop the subscription,
remove the rows on publisher and subscriber then do a nosync initialization.
HTH
Paul Ibison SQL Server MVP, www.replicationanswers.com
(recommended sql server 2000 replication book:
http://www.nwsu.com/0974973602p.html)