The insert statement is used to populate a class with instances:
INSERT INTO weather
VALUES ('San Francisco', 46, 50, 0.25, '11/27/1994')
You can also use the copy command to perform load large amounts of data from flat (ASCII) files. This is usually faster because the data is read (or written) as a single atomic transaction directly to or from the target table. An example would be:
COPY INTO weather FROM '/home/user/weather.txt'
USING DELIMITERS '|';
where the path name for the source file must be available to
the backend server machine, not the client, since the backend
server reads the file directly.