Postgres insert optimization

Question

I have a script that generates tens of thousands of inserts into a postgres db through a custom ORM. As you can imagine, it\'s quite slow. This is used for development purpose

Answer 1

For inserts that number in the hundreds to thousands, batch them:

begin;
insert1 ...
insert2 ...
...
insert10k ... 
commit;

For inserts in the millions use copy:

COPY test (ts) FROM stdin;
2010-11-29 22:32:01.383741-07
2010-11-29 22:32:01.737722-07
... 1Million rows
\.

Make sure any col used as an fk in another table is indexed if it's more than trivial in size in the other table.