A day spent on tuning

I spent most of the day working on the test server. Right now it takes about an hour, start to finish, to load up a new period in the period financial databases. There are 18 databases that need to get loaded, as well as one staging database that is used to feed these 18 databases. Currently the process takes about an hour. It’s not bad, but lately I’ve been thinking about how the process could be improved and sped up. It’s not that taking an hour is a bad thing, when the system works and all the numbers tie out, because we don’t generally need to process data more than once an hour, but if the numbers don’t tie out for some reason, then it’s time to reprocess, and there goes another hour. So how does the current process work?