This is all extremely helpful. After some hair pulling I was able to get the local sql server express running and I ran the same test on a local instance.
1010 0.126 0.000 0.126 0.000 {method 'execute' of 'pyodbc.Cursor' objects} 1010 0.060 0.000 0.060 0.000 {method 'close' of 'pyodbc.Cursor' objects} Results seem to be as you expected and I am assuming this means the bottle neck is running the connection over the vpn. I am not terribly network/sys admin savvy but I am going to do the best to troubleshoot the network connection the best I can. I'm a little concerned about what I will find though because I can run the same inserts in sql server management studio without any network slowness. For instance I can run the following over the network through ssms in 1 second: DECLARE @x INT = 0 WHILE @x < 1000 BEGIN SET @x += 1 INSERT INTO dbo.customer(name) VALUES ('NAME ' + CAST(@x AS VARCHAR(100))) END I know that ORM's in general aren't supposed to be as fast as straight sql but does ssms performance contradict the network slowness? Also the vpn connection itself is reporting a fast connection. So best steps for debugging the slow connection? -I'm trying to be able to run this in the vpn network itself but for the moment that is not possible for reasons outside my control -Talk to the hosting company? -Look up SQL Server connection settings -Test connection settings? -ping the server? Thanks again for walking me through the profile. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sqlalchemy" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sqlalchemy+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sqlalchemy@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/sqlalchemy. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.