Thanks for the suggestions. I have made some of the modifications suggested specifically changing the insert statement loop and cleaning up my statement handles.

I still wanted/needed to use the intermediate table so that I could take advantage of an index. The target table to update can contain 40K + unindexed records. Trying to use an update statement like update owner.table set field=new value where xyz=123 is extremely slow and would mean that I am doing a full table scan of these very large tables for each update statement.

By using the temporary table I can take advantage of an index on the counter value and scan the table only once. This proves to be much more efficient.

Things seem to be working much better. I ran an update of 15,000 records in a little over a minute (this includes the ftp, load and update). An update of 41,000 still hung on me, but I haven't been able to repeat that.

I appreciate all the help, I think I am good to go.

Regards, Tony