<snip>
On frequent

> occasion (4-5 times a week) large sets of data will be exported based upon
> selection criteria. This is not a problem at all. I have used what has
> been termed a "firehose" connection. Its very fast. I have offloaded 2
> million records at around 5000 records per second to disk from a client.

So, on one hand your writes to the DB are slow, on the other hand your reads are
fast. How many tiggers, indexes etc. do you have on that table? Maybe that is
the whole culprit?

Btw, I noticed that you are working Continuity Partners Inc. in Vegas. I hope
it's not the same tele-scam company that I have heard about....

Raf