Hints on how to fill a database.

doc/src/sgml/populate.sgml

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+ <chapter>
+  <title>Populating a Database</title>
+
+  <note>
+   <title>Author</title>
+   <para>
+    Written by Tom Lane, from an e-mail message dated 1999-12-05.
+   </para>
+  </note>
+
+  <para>
+   One may need to do a large number of table insertions when first
+   populating a database. Here are some tips and techniques for making that as
+   efficient as possible.
+  </para>
+
+  <sect1>
+   <title>Disable Auto-commit</title>
+
+   <para>
+    Turn off auto-commit and just do one commit at
+    the end.  Otherwise <productname>Postgres</productname> is doing a
+    lot of work for each record
+    added.  In general when you are doing bulk inserts, you want
+    to turn off some of the database features to gain speed.
+   </para>
+  </sect1>
+
+  <sect1>
+   <title>Use COPY FROM</title>
+
+   <para>
+    Use <command>COPY FROM STDIN</command> to load all the records in one
+    command, instead
+    of a series of INSERT commands.  This reduces parsing, planning, etc
+    overhead a great deal. If you do this then it's not necessary to fool
+    around with autocommit.
+   </para>
+  </sect1>
+
+  <sect1>
+   <title>Remove Indices</title>
+
+   <para>
+    If you are loading a freshly created table, the fastest way is to
+    create the table, bulk-load with COPY, then create any indexes needed
+    for the table.  Creating an index on pre-existing data is quicker than
+    updating it incrementally as each record is loaded.
+   </para>
+
+   <para>
+    If you are augmenting an existing table, you can <command>DROP
+     INDEX</command>, load the table, then recreate the index. Of
+    course, the database performance for other users may be adversely 
+    affected during the time that the index is missing.
+   </para>
+  </sect1>
+ </chapter>
+
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