Jonathan,

Thanks again.

David

Thanks to both of you.

I do normally use parameterized queries, but was lazy in this example. However, I did not realize that not using them would affect the plan...

Jonathan,

Yes, we are using varchars. It makes a lot of sense that the cast is expensive. I expected to take a hit with LINQ, but not as big as I...

SSIS is certainly worth investigating, but realistically it will not be for this round. It is more cost effective to wait a few more hours for the current application to...

Thanks for the responses.

DTS would not work for this. The data will come in in different formats and there is some data manipulation involved. There is a base class...

Jeff,

I am not sure how much information about the application I can reveal in a post, so I cannot be specific. 

I think that the major problem that we have...

Jeff,

The queries are long, not because they are complex, but because they operate on huge amounts of data. 

We also use tables that are pre-prepared from all the data for...

Jambu,

What exactly is a control file?  Is it just a file with the value ranges that can be used in a query to pull out rows with values that are...

Yes, it is a form of data inconsistency.  But how would normalization help check that a float field contains values between 10.5 and 20.5?

Our database is used primarily for querying.  There is no updating within the application that access the database.  We get the data from varied sources.  Unfortunately, there is no control...

Thanks All...

But isn't the explicit cast more efficient than the implicit cast? I'm not sure how SQLServer does it, but somehow it must find out the datatype that is being...

Remi,

Thank you.  Worked perfectly.

David

I am not a DBA nor an Access developer.  The last few years I have been developing in the .NET environment.  However, I have worked with Access from time to...

Just when I thought that it was all settled... 

This is not a heavily transactional environment and the only person likely to update or insert a record is the person...

Thanks Everyone,

Frank, this is an Internet application where the insert/update happens one record a time, so I cannot truncate the table.  

Looks like if exists() gets the nod.  It does seem cleaner...