Since everything is being brought in as a VARCHAR, is there any reason you
cannot use the .startsWith(") method from the String class?
String.startsWith() may execute faster than Integer.parseInt() (or so I
assume - logically at least, this seems probable), but I think the
Interger.parseInt() method is probably the best one to use. As the data
value in the varchar column can potentially be made up on 16 characters -
and any of those characters may be the non-numeric character.
Thanks for the suggestion Annetta.
