>A way around :) Not a clear one but might be creating a service that runs with a trusted account (sysadmin,bulkadmin) and checks for txt files ready to be uploaded. No sample as I didn't even done or tested, off the top of my head.

I thought about that. Let users simply post a file with the keys up to a collection area and have a trusted app do the importing. Need to master the SQL stored procedures before I consider that route.

>
>OpenRowset is the one that looks promising to me. Combined with insert into/select or insert into/exec it might work fast. Unfortunately couldn't locate my own samples right now :(
>
>There is also SQLDMO Bulkcopy object and I don't know if that needs sysadmin/bulkadmin role (it's good to be a sysadmin:)
>
I shall look into that one. Haven't come across it before.

>Thousands of users ? and each with thousands of recs upload or few per user ? If the latter than conventional ways might be enough. A very busy server you'll have I think :)

Not really - the key upload is a one off exercise for each user when they initialise their software. Thereafter they will use one of the keys each time they send an audited or encrypted email. On average, over the course of a year or so, each user will probably only use the server a few times a day at most.

Thanks for all your help. Most valuable.

Harry