Disabling WAL for bulk data loads

I am coming from an Oracle background - which in the case of bulk data loads
there were several options I had where I could disable writing to the redo
log to speed up the bulk data load (i.e. direct load, set the user session
in no archive logging, set the affected tables to have no logging).

I know the COPY command is one option - however it appears the data would
need to be in formatted file in order to use it correct? I want to avoid
writing a new file out for the COPY command and loading that.

What other options does Postgres 7.4 provide which would allow data loads to
bypass writing to the WAL? I don't need to have this enabled - because in
the event of a database crash, I would simply reload the data from the
source files as recovery.

Thanks,

Kevin

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