I think funnily enough even though it is the same mechanism bcp is faster cause it is 100% native, I have seen native odbc outperform sqlclient by a factor of 2

I think funnily enough even though it is the same mechanism bcp is faster cause it is 100% native, I have seen native odbc outperform sqlclient by a factor of 2, would assume you would get the same for bulk operations. As always you are going to need to test. Now ... a hand coded c++ odbc implementation that uses the bulk insert services should be identical to bcp.