GilaMonster (6/21/2012)
This actually sounds like a case for partitioning. Partition the main table, make sure the staging table is identical (indexes, constraints, columns, etc) then to move the data from staging into main you could just add a new partition to the main table and switch that new partiton with the staging table. Metadata operation, near instant.
This works really fast. Only thing is, you need to be using the Enterprise Edition of SQL Server. What edition are you using?