find duplicates between 2 tables

[Mong]

Hi,

I've got an application that imports records from a text file into a
temporary table. I then want to insert from the temp table into a
master table but only records which are not in there already. The data
has no unique fields so to find a duplicate record each field in the
tables would need to be compared. There are 33 fields in the master
table consisting of text, number and date/time. The temp table has the
same fields except that they're all text.

I can think of a few ways to do this but I'm not sure what the fastest
would be, which is very important as the import would be of about
100,000 records each time.

I'd ideally like to compare the temp table to the master table and any
records which do not already exist in the master table be inserted
into a staging table, then insert all from the staging table into the
master table after the compare.

Any and all suggestions welcome!

Regards,

Mong

[pietlinden]

use the Find Unmatched query wizard. Then turn that into an append
query once you have it selecting the right records.