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
