It is just 17000 records of just one field CustomerID.

I am using everything that people mentioned above for different projects: Linked server with the text driver, OPENROWSET, CLR in 2005 to deal with text files, BCP, an independent (from the third-party) Reporting Database. I also support MS ACCESS /EXCELL VBA import from text files, VBscript from the ASP pages, VBscript by the cscript, whatever. My preferences are to use the back-end processing on the same server after getting the source data into temp tables. It is usually faster then doing the front-end processing or distributed queries.