I'm still running a fresh import (8 hours so far, but then again I have 7000+ episodes) and after it's complete I'll make a backup of the db. And a backup of the backup!
Just wondering what type of rig you are crunching the database on? MY HTPC is pretty vanilla (AMD X2 4800+) and my 2000 episode library takes around 30 mins or so to complete. SQL is fairly robust for large databases so I would expect it to take around 2 hours for me if I had 8000 episodes.
thx