I think Sean may have meant to use External Table just to bring the data
into an IB database.

If you are using Windows NT or Win2k you should restrict IB to use
just _one_ processor (use IB_Affinity if you don't use a version of IB
that only uses one of the CPUs).

If your CPU is fast and you have fast disks you may be able to do better
than 8 mill/hour (which is slightly more thab 2000 records/second) if
fetching the input records is not slowing the process. Is your CPU running
at 100%?

Is ForcedWrites OFF ?
What kind of RAID are you using (if any)?
Cache size?
Page size?


Regards,
Aage J.