Advice on moving rows to history

I am trying to figure out the fastest way to move rows from a current
table to a history table. There are currently 150,000 rows of which
about 60,000 get moved (monthly). There are multiple queries involved to
figure out whether or not a row should be moved, so I am making multiple
passes over the table. Right now I see two options

1) Write a function that inserts a row into the history table and then
removes it from the current
2) Have a status flag that marks the rows for history and then insert
them into the history table then remove all of these rows from the
current.

I would like to know what other peoples experiences have been with this
problem, and what would you suggest.

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Dave Smith
CANdata Systems Ltd
416-493-9020