entity relationships and performance

I have large, very heavily used database (SQL 2000). Performance is critical. I have a job that runs on a nightly basis to delete records no longer need from specific tables (as to keep them manageable).

My question, does have entity relationships on these tables adversely affect performance? The cleanup batch job is taking so long now that I'd like to delete table relationships to speed it up.

I understand the value for maintaining data integerity, but any insight as to how relationships affect performance?

Thanks.Well, I delete the relationships. The batch job that deleted records went from 6-10 hours to 22 minutes.

So, while I don't think there is a major performance hit by having relationships established and doing selects/inserts/updates, there obviously is when it comes to deletes.|||whether you are doing inserts, updates or deletes there wil lalways be a "HIT" due to RI. Insert or Update 10,000 records at one time, both with and without RI and you will see a diffrence. The question is does removal of RI justify the speed over potentialy corrupted data.|||Obviously, the performance gain was substantial. Are there any performance gains via relationships, i.e. does the query optimizer leverage relationships when creating execution plans?|||No. The optimizer looks at indexes, statistics and hints to decide the best query plan.
Referential integrity is there solely to enforce the quality of the data.