Inofrmix "Online" processing problem.

Online 5.07.UC1 4gl 4.1 SCO Unix We have a 24 hour online order entry system with about 150 simultaneous users. As you can imagine, there is an orders table being written to. It is very important that there are no significant performance hits during order entry as time is money. Response time has to be sub-second. The aforementioned orders table has to be processed daily for two reasons : 1. To generate bills for those unbilled orders and in some case subsequent bills as the billing period could be every 6 months forever on a single order. 2. To "fulfill" the orders, in other words to make sure products that the customer has ordered actual get delivered. These two processes obviously have a potential performance hit on the database while they are running. One approach, which we are quite happy to take, is to have a duplicate of the orders table on another machine and use this for processing. However, this has potential dangers as osmething could go wrong in keeping them in paralell. Anybody hit this problem before? How did you get around it?