Difference between INSERT and COPY in PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL Diff INSERT and COPY, performance

Quite a number of reasons, actually, but the main ones are:

• Typically, client applications wait for confirmation of one INSERT’s success before sending the next. So there’s a round-trip delay for each INSERT, scheduling delays, etc (pREST supports pipelineing INSERTs in batches, open source project). This point is the most significant, It’s all about network round-trips and rescheduling delays;
• Each INSERT has to go through the whole executor. Use of a prepared statement bypasses the need to run the parser, rewriter and planner, but there’s still executor state to set up and tear down for each row. COPY does some setup once, and has an extremely low overhead for each row, especially where no triggers are involved.

pREST of COPY batches INSERT’s support?

Yes, we support the insertion operation using COPY when explained in the http protocol header.

Prest-Batch-Method: copy, when not declared pREST will use INSERT.

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