From: Christopher Browne <cbbrowne@acm.org>
Subject: Re: Export tab delimited from mysql to postgres.
Date: Mon, 11 Oct 2004 20:46:02 -0400
Organization: cbbrowne Computing Inc
Lines: 28
Message-ID: <m3d5zoyd9x.fsf@knuth.knuth.cbbrowne.com>
References: <82E30406384FFB44AFD1012BAB230B5505F40D3E@shiva.au.lpint.net>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
User-Agent: Gnus/5.1006 (Gnus v5.10.6) XEmacs/21.4 (Security Through
 Obscurity,
	linux)
Cancel-Lock: sha1:GCXQqgWhXpJE4iKWzyvJ+HyYgw4=
To: pgsql-sql@postgresql.org

Quoth Theo.Galanakis@lonelyplanet.com.au (Theo Galanakis):
>         Could you provide a example of how to do this?
>
>         I actually ended up exporting the data as Insert statements,
> which strips out cf/lf within varchars. However it takes an eternity
> to import 200,000 records... 24 hours infact???? Is this normal?

I expect that this results from each INSERT being a separate
transaction.

If you put a BEGIN at the start and a COMMIT at the end, you'd
doubtless see an ENORMOUS improvement.

That's not even the _big_ improvement, either.  The _big_ improvement
would involve reformatting the data so that you could use the COPY
statement, which is _way_ faster than a bunch of INSERTs.  Take a look
at the documentation to see the formatting that is needed:

http://techdocs.postgresql.org/techdocs/usingcopy.php
http://www.faqs.org/docs/ppbook/x5504.htm
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/7.4/static/sql-copy.html
-- 
output = ("cbbrowne" "@" "ntlug.org")
http://www3.sympatico.ca/cbbrowne/lsf.html
Question: How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb?

Answer: Two, one to hold the giraffe, and the other to fill the bathtub
        with brightly colored machine tools.