
I am planning on purging Utility Data in database (yes, in our test environment first!). I realize without knowing any more than that it may be hard to answer this question but here goes anyway...
Can I expect this to take a long time? Should I be expecting something on the order of minutes or hours? I don't want to kill the process thinking it has hung when in reality it's only a quarter done.
There are too many variables to answer the "long time" question. When I do these types of projects, I take advantage of SQL to tell me how things are going. Depending on the type of data, I may watch the row count of a table (for example, if I am moving open to history, I'll watch the row count on the related tables) or I may watch my task in SQL Activity Monitor (so I can refresh what script it is currently running, looking for changes in the data in the current query).
If possible, you may want to run the process directly on the SQL Server so that you minimize the changes of network interference.
Don't rely on "Dynamics GP has stopped responding" as a sign something isn't working. If you task has sent a big SQL transaction to the server, Windows is likely to not respond in the allowed time. not responding does NOT mean the process is hung.