the reason we are using OPENXML in SQL Server 2000 is we get a list of integers from a source and we need to pass them into a stored procedure to be turned into a table to be joined with some destination table in order to filter out records that don't meet the search criteria. We cannot use comma-delimited strings since we never know how many values will be passed in. That's why we fomat integers as attributese and pass them as a text variable to a stored procedure which shreds the xml and inserts the field into a table variable. The problem we are having with OPENXML is poor response times when the number of records passed in is more than 150000. The following graph show how long (in seconds) it takes to obtain a hanle and open the document respectively.

I could not find any alternative in SQL Server 2000 to achive better results when dealing with big files except for saving it somewhere on a hard drive and using the file path and a bcp utility to load from a file.(I really do not want to do this).