Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 DBA Survival Guide, Second Edition

BCP Tips

Use the following tips to help simplify data imports and exports:

• Use BCP hints to improve performance— The following hints can significantly improve BCP performance:

  Hint	Purpose
  TABLOCK	Implements a table-level lock for the duration of the import. During informal testing of this option, BCP load times have decreased as much as 400%!
  ORDER (column_list) where	Use this option if your data column_list = {column is presorted, and the sort
  [ASC | DESC] [,n]}	column(s) match the clustered index in the corresponding table. By presorting the data, the clustered index can be updated more quickly.

• Load from local files— BCP runs faster when importing a file on the local machine, as opposed to importing a file over the network. Loading locally can improve ...