postgresql/doc/src/sgml/populate.sgml
Peter Eisentraut 72ad5fe15c Add id' attributes to all chapter' and `sect1' tags, to generate useful
names for the HTML files (e.g., not x4856.htm).
2000-09-29 20:21:34 +00:00

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<chapter id="populate">
<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 id="disable-autocommit">
<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 id="populate-copy-from">
<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 id="populate-rm-indices">
<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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