>Do all of these operations have to be handled under the same transaction? Can you commit the changes to the customers before copying their transactions to history?
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I guess i could, what i'm really interested to know is how in theory long transactions like that are handled in very large database. How do you avoid locking records for a long period of time without compromizing the integrity of the transaction.

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>Are you doing all of these operations from outside SQL Server? What are you copying back?
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Yes i am, i know your answer to this one will be to use a stored procedure to make it much faster, but we decided a long time ago not to use stored prodedures as our # 1 rule to keep our components backend independent.

Stephane