Fastest way to insert lots of rows in MSSQL 2005

[growse]

I've got a database on which I need to generate a meta table thingie. Problem is, the table I'm generating is about 300,000 rows, so I need to know what's the fastest way to insert a large number of rows into a blank table.

Currently, I'm building the inserts as a single transaction into a proxy table, dropping the main table and then recreating the main table as a select of the proxy table, before finally re-creating the indexes on the main table. This allows lookups to still occur on the main table as the lock only happens for a very small amount of time.

The inserts into the proxy table are quite slow, and whilst this isn't necessarily causing any performance problems in the app, I want to be sure I'm doing it in the most efficient way.

 

[growse]

That is, pretty much what I'm doing. Renaming / copying the proxy table to the main table is very very fast. The slow bit is the actual insert to the proxy table.

I've looked at bulk insert, but doesn't that require the input file to be on the local disk of the database server? Not sure if that's possible as the db is on a different box to the server executing the inserts....