Hi all

We've been having to deal with a bad situation for quite a few years now - how to handle large imports without taking the server down (in fact that data is meant to be acessible as soon as its ready in production).

This is a call center software which routinely imports lists of clients and possible clients to contact.

The import happens on 2 main tables, clients and calls, which are exactly the same tables the operators will use/update while working.

These are very large tables (over 200 fields each), with many fk's (and a lot of the fk indexes are reportedly bad ones).

Not only importing is taking very long, but while importing is happening, performance in production takes a severe hit.

I know theres no magic wand, but I seriously need to start making a checklist of practices I should be trying out to contour this situation.

Thanks in advance...please let me know if I can clarify the issue further.