Interesting article, thanks Rob.

Have you written any documents (or aware of any documentation) that details how the globals work in the background? I know when I started coding Mumps in the early 90's, I assumed that every time you referred to a global in the code the data was being accessed directly from the disk. However I know that isn't the case and have a vague understanding that the global data is stored in data blocks stored in a b-tree structure but I would like a deeper understanding of how globals are actually stored and managed.  

I don't fully understand the Cache licences as they are managed by someone else in our company but my understanding is that whenever a task is 'JOB'bed on a database the licence count is increased. For that reason we avoid JOB's unless absolutely necessary. 

Hope that helps in some way.

This is how I would do it.  Use the following query to insert the data (note the colons before the variable names);

&sql(
        insert into tableX
            (firstname,middleName,surname)
        values
            (:firstname,:middleName,:surname)
    )

I don't know how you have your data stored, but assuming that the data is on an array, try something along these lines:

set idx=""
for {
    set idx=$order(personArray(idx))
    quit:idx=""

    set firstname=personArray(idx,"firstName")
    set middleName=personArray(idx,"middleName")
    set surname=personArray(idx,"surname")
     
    &sql(
        insert into tableX
            (firstname,middleName,surname)
        values
            (:firstname,:middleName,:surname)
    )
}

Hope this is useful.