Re: Continual uptime while loading data ... COPY vs INSERTS within a transaction.

On Sat, 2008-02-09 at 19:27 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> Benjamin Arai <me(at)benjaminarai(dot)com> writes:
> > We are thinking of modifying our system to use COPY to replace these
> > large INSERT transactions but we are concerned that it will greatly
> > impact the user experience (i.e., exclusively lock the table during the
> > copy process). First, does COPY grab an exclusive lock? Second, is
> > there a better way to load data?
>
> No, and no. Use COPY.

Unless inserting into a table that has rules and those rules need
to fire. I think I saw a post (by you, Tom) that said COPY doesn't
fire rules (haven't read the 8.3 release notes yet though, if COPY
fires rules in 8.3 that'd be great, I'd love to use copy for pushing
rows into the base table and having the rules fire so the right data
goes into the right "inherits" descendant tables).

tiger