Since I removed mirroring from the archive database the queries are performing much better. Thanks heaps for helping me out with that! 🙂

I do have a question though (just to understand a point you made earlier)

you mentioned the problem stored proc could be rewritten to accept a table-valued parameter so that it could do bulk inserts rather than singleton ones.

If table valued parameters are not persistent from one sp call to another how could using them help with my issue (as there would be new data in the variable every time the proc was called?

Anyway thanks again!