>Al,
>
>>>Per your suggestion about table buffering, I switched the RVs to use optimistic row buffering (=3) instead of the default optimistic table buffering (=5). AFAIK those are the only two settings that are valid for RVs.
>>>Results:
>>>Table buffering: 7:49
>>>Row buffering: 8:07
>
>I'd presume this is to do with the overhead of multiple writes needing another transaction and log every time, while table buffering and its database log are much more efficient than usual when appending into an empty table. Just for interest, do you have it in differential or complete mode?

Not sure how much bearing it has on databases that are in Simple recovery mode. It's possible to do full or differential backups but I don't need to do either in my processing scenario.

As for the transaction logs, my understanding is in Simple mode the log only needs to retain records for transactions that have not yet been successfully committed. If the log file is large enough and the DB server is not overloaded then the server will start recycling parts of the transaction log.