In the theoretical sense, it should not be necessary to insert multiple rows in one command (as stated above). But in the practical sense, we have had to do this. The number of round trips to the database (for us) greatly affected performance.

Our technique (for MS SQL Server and Oracle) is not discussed here. We generate Insert statements and concatenate them into a string and execute them using an ADO.NET command object. It reduces the number of round trips to one--and it works.