> The thing works ok, i suppose. The problem is in the user
> interface. I have a button on screen (Delphi) that will
> execute the sp and shows the result (how many
> succeeds/failed, etc) afterwards, but pushing this button
> means the user is going to have to stare at the hourglass
> cursor for minutes without any visual cues.
>
> Can anyone offer a better suggestion on how to improve this?
>
> One approach i'm thinking about is to get rid of the outer
> stored procedure, and call the inner stored procedure from
> the client side...., something like the following (in
> delphi-pseudocode):

That's sort of what I try to do. All processing procedures suspend little
indicators of progress, or write progress steps to a small table, and the
interface watches this small table.

I guess the other way to handle this is to simply get the interface to
appear busy - some kind of graphical indicator - without actually getting
progress info from the DB. Once the procedure is finished, the graphical
thingo stops.

At least it'll give the user some indication that it's still working...

N.