Re: Export tab delimited from mysql to postgres.

Thanks for all your comments,

I have beent trying the insert within a transaction block, however
it does not seem to reduce the time it takes to process each records. Mind
you there are 80 column and the insert statement explicitly defines the
column to insert into.

I need any tip I can get help me transform the text file into a
format postgres copy will successfully read.

Here is sample of the current format of a mysql tab delimited dump..

columnA columnB
1 What a day!
2 What a week it has
been!
3 What the!

As you can see row 2 has a value that holds a CR value which ends up
wrapping around onto the third line. Postgres copy command does not like
this and mysql is unable to replace the value with another type of
delimiter, like a \r.

So I gather I have to some how manually replace the carriage return with
something postgres understand \r...

columnA columnB
1 What a day!
2 What a week it has \r been!
3 What the!

How do I do this without getting a text file that looks like this
1 What a day! \r\n2 What a week it has \r been!\r\n3
What the!\r\n

Any help would be appreciated.

Theo

-----Original Message-----
From: Christopher Browne [mailto:cbbrowne(at)acm(dot)org]
Sent: Tuesday, 12 October 2004 10:46 AM
To: pgsql-sql(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: [SQL] Export tab delimited from mysql to postgres.

Quoth Theo(dot)Galanakis(at)lonelyplanet(dot)com(dot)au (Theo Galanakis):
>         Could you provide a example of how to do this?
>
>         I actually ended up exporting the data as Insert statements,
> which strips out cf/lf within varchars. However it takes an eternity
> to import 200,000 records... 24 hours infact???? Is this normal?

I expect that this results from each INSERT being a separate transaction.

If you put a BEGIN at the start and a COMMIT at the end, you'd doubtless see
an ENORMOUS improvement.

That's not even the _big_ improvement, either. The _big_ improvement would
involve reformatting the data so that you could use the COPY statement,
which is _way_ faster than a bunch of INSERTs. Take a look at the
documentation to see the formatting that is needed:

http://techdocs.postgresql.org/techdocs/usingcopy.php
http://www.faqs.org/docs/ppbook/x5504.htm
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/7.4/static/sql-copy.html
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