I have a table that goes through a bunch of steps, and then needs to clear itself out. I want to copy the values from this table to another before it is truncated. I won't go into the specifics, but there is a good reason for this.

I'm trying to figure out the best way to do this. The two options I see are:

-Everytime I insert/update the first table, perform the same operation on the second table.

-Once the first time is finalized, before it is truncated, copy it all over to the second table.

Is either strategy better then the other in terms of performance? I don't have much SQL experience, so I don't have any idea.