Christian Bourque wrote:
Hi,

I have a performance problem with a script that does massive bulk
insert in 6 tables. When the script starts the performance is really
good but will degrade minute after minute and take almost a day to
finish!
Would I be correct in guessing that there are foreign key relationships between those tables, and that there are significant numbers of indexes in use?

The foreign key checking costs will go up as the tables grow, and AFAIK the indexes get a bit more expensive to maintain too.

If possible you should probably drop your foreign key relationships and drop your indexes, insert your data, then re-create the indexes and foreign keys. The foreign keys will be rechecked when you recreate them, and it's *vastly* faster to do it that way. Similarly, building an index from scratch is quite a bit faster than progressively adding to it. Of course, dropping the indices is only useful if you aren't querying the tables as you build them.

Also, if you're loading data using stored procedures you should avoid the use of exception blocks. I had some major problems with my bulk data conversion code due to overuse of exception blocks creating large numbers of subtransactions behind the scenes and slowing everything to a crawl.

--
Craig Ringer

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