How to speed up insert performance in CockroachDB

Question

Is there a way to optimize the insertion of a lot of data into an empty CockroachDB table?

Answer 1

To optimize inserting data into CockroachDB tables, there are a few pieces of guidance:

• Create the table without any secondary indexes, insert your data, and then add any secondary indexes you want.
• Insert 500 rows per INSERT statement. That number might vary a bit depending on the size of your rows, but is a good guideline to optimize the speed at which you can write data.
• Use the IMPORT statement to bulk import CSV files into a single table. This is the fastest way to get data into CockroachDB.

If you're moving from PostgreSQL to CockroachDB, you can also use pg_dump to create a COPY statement, which CockroachDB is optimized to ingest. It's a slightly more involved process, but you can find the details about how to do it in CockroachDB's import documentation.