Bill Oliver wrote:
I am looking for some guidance on bulk loading data into Firebird. What I want to do is turn off integrity constraints and just load the data as fast as possible.
For example, with SQL Server, you have the "bcp", or "Bulk Copy" program. With MySQL I can do a `LOAD DATA` statmeent, and if I want to turn on integrity constrainst, I issue a `SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0` statement before executing `LOAD DATA`.
Answer from Ann Harrison:
Well, one approach is to turn off integrity checks. If this is something you do a log, I'd create two DDL scripts for the database - one that defines only columns and tables and one that adds constraints, triggers, indexes, etc. Run the first, load the data, then run the second.
In terms of actually loading the data, the fastest approach is to format the data in files with fixed length columns, map those files to external tables, and load the internal tables with:
insert into ... select from ...
Of course, that gets messy if you've got nulls, but few non-database data sources represent nulls well.
Failing that, write a preprocessed application that reads your data source and stores the data. It should run on the server - classic on Unix type systems, embedded for Windows.