Hello all -

I have a situation where I'm importing substantial amounts of data (30,000 to
120,000 rows at a pop) from three external sources through a text file or an
Excel spreadsheet into three different data tables. I've established lookup
tables for those fields that can reasonably be normalized between and amongst
the data tables.

The process I'm going through is:

1. Import the raw data into an "import" table that matches the structure of
the source data. Also included in the import table are columns for foreign
keys of 'normalizable' fields, which are set to 0 when the source data is
imported.

2. Append any new lookup data that may be present in the source file to the
lookup tables.

3. Run a series of update queries on the import table to update the foreign
key fields with the keys of the lookup data. Depending on the source data
file, there are between 3 and 7 of these update queries.

4. Append new records into the data table using only the foreign key values
where applicable.

I'm discovering that the update queries in step 3 are taking a LONG time to
run (several minutes each), which is going to annoy my users to no end.

My questions a
- are there other, better processes or data structures to use?
- is there a way of optimizing update queries?

I appreciate any help or suggestions -
Dave