How to Quickly Insert Data Into MariaDB

This article describes different techniques for inserting data quickly into MariaDB.

Background

When inserting new data into MariaDB, the things that take time are (in order of importance):

• Syncing data to disk (as part of the end of transactions)

• Adding new keys. The larger the index, the more time it takes to keep keys updated.

• Checking against foreign keys (if they exist).

• Adding rows to the storage engine.

• Sending data to the server.

The following describes the different techniques (again, in order of importance) you can use to quickly insert data into a table.

Disabling Keys

You can temporarily disable updating of non-unique indexes. This is mostly useful when there are zero (or very few) rows in the table into which you are inserting data.

In many storage engines (at least MyISAM and Aria),ENABLE KEYS works by scanning through the row data and collecting keys, sorting them and then creating the index blocks. This is an order of magnitude faster than creating the index one row at a time and it also uses less key buffer memory.

Note: When you insert into an empty table with or , MariaDB automatically does a before and an afterwards.

When inserting big amounts of data, integrity checks are sensibly time-consuming. It is possible to disable the UNIQUE indexes and the checks using the and the system variables:

For InnoDB tables, the can be temporarily set to 2, which is the fastest setting:

Also, if the table has or columns, you may want to drop them, insert all data, and recreate them.

Loading Text Files

The fastest way to insert data into MariaDB is through the command.

The simplest form of the command is:

You can also read a file locally on the machine where the client is running by using:

This is not as fast as reading the file on the server side, but the difference is not that big.

LOAD DATA INFILE is very fast because:

1. there is no parsing of SQL.

2. data is read in big blocks.

3. if the table is empty at the beginning of the operation, all non-unique indexes are disabled during the operation.

4. the engine is told to cache rows first and then insert them in big blocks (At least MyISAM and Aria support this).

Because of the above speed advantages there are many cases, when you need to insert many rows at a time, where it may be faster to create a file locally, add the rows there, and then use LOAD DATA INFILE to load them; compared to using INSERT to insert the rows.

You will also get forLOAD DATA INFILE.

mariadb-import

You can import many files in parallel with (mysqlimport before ). For example:

Internally uses to read in the data.

Inserting Data with INSERT Statements

Using Big Transactions

When doing many inserts in a row, you should wrap them with BEGIN / END to avoid doing a full transaction (which includes a disk sync) for every row. For example, doing a begin/end every 1000 inserts will speed up your inserts by almost 1000 times.

The reason why you may want to have many BEGIN/END statements instead of just one is that the former will use up less transaction log space.

Multi-Value Inserts

You can insert many rows at once with multi-value row inserts:

The limit for how much data you can have in one statement is controlled by the server variable.

Inserting Data Into Several Tables at Once

If you need to insert data into several tables at once, the best way to do so is to enable multi-row statements and send many inserts to the server at once:

is a function that returns the lastauto_increment value inserted.

By default, the command line mariadb client will send the above as multiple statements.

To test this in the mariadb client you have to do:

Note: for multi-query statements to work, your client must specify theCLIENT_MULTI_STATEMENTS flag to mysql_real_connect().

Server Variables That Can be Used to Tune Insert Speed

See for the full list of server variables.

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