Combining the "insert" statements in a big concatenated string
joined by semicolons - rather than sending each individually
can drastically speed up your inserts; making them much closer
to the speed of copy.
For example, instead of sending them separately, it's much faster
to send a single string like this
"insert into tbl (c1,c2) values (v1,v2);insert into tbl (c1,c2) values (v3,v4);..."
presumably due to the round-trip packets sending each insert takes.
Brian Hurt wrote:
>
> Inserts, 1,000 per transaction ~5,400 inserts/second
> Copy, 1,000 element blocks ~20,000 inserts/second
>
When I last measured it it was about a factor of 4 speedup
(3 seconds vs 0.7 seconds) by concatenating the inserts with
sample code shown her [1].
If the same ratio holds for your test case, these concatenated
inserts would be almost the exact same speed as a copy.
Ron M
[1] http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-performance/2005-09/msg00327.php
