Thanks David. This is very useful information. I'm not happy about non-logged activity so will move BCP to the bottom of the list of options

I'm curions about the method described in your second paragraph. Could you elaborate please. Specifically, how do you do the inserts? What command do you use to truncate? In this case, a set of business rules are used to determine which orders are ready to archive. They won't be consecutive so I'm not sure that truncate, as I understand it, will work. I insert the PK for the "completed" records into a SQL table with a single field. This is used to drive the monthly close process so that the parent, all children and data from all tables referenced as a FK are copied as well.