Re: Way to optimize time to process text file

[Phillip Ward]

To do anything once takes a finite amount of time.

To do the same thing a thousand times takes at least a thousand times as long.

Loading 4GB of anything is going to take a while.

If you have a production process that is reading the table that you are loading into, then yes; you're going to get contention and it's going to be very, very bad for application performance.
In such cases, you may have to reconsider the data [table] structures that you're working with. If you're doing this often (daily?) then you might need to load it into an ancillary table and then copy the data into the "proper" table within the database (which should be quicker) or, perhaps, load a new table each time and define a View that joins it with other, previously loaded tables. YMMV.

Regards, Phill W.