&gt;The part about downloading entire databases to view your subset of the data.<p>You&#x27;re not doing this though you&#x27;re downloading the entire database to verify the subset is true and you&#x27;re using blocks because adding single transactions at a time when you need to have known ordering amongst a lot of participants leads to a lot of overhead that is removed by batching.<p>The type of information we&#x27;re talking about isn&#x27;t sensitive though(unless your going down the drain and trying to hide it).  And yes I just made up that I worked in ETL at MS a department pretty much no one that hasn&#x27;t worked in knows exists.