Bulk-insert ten thousand rows without timing out the import

My CSV import inserts rows one at a time. It works fine on my laptop, but on the real dataset it's still crawling twenty minutes in.

Intermediate to advancedRead 5 minDoing: an hour6 steps

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What you'll have at the end

The same ten thousand rows landing through a handful of batched statements and one transaction instead of ten thousand separate round trips, with your own timed run proving the difference before and after.

Before you start

You need

A working import script that adds rows to the database one at a time through your ORM, plus a table you can safely test against using a throwaway copy of the data.

Not covered

Loading the file straight into the database with a bulk-load command that skips the ORM's models and validation entirely; that's a different, faster route for when even a batched insert isn't enough.

Leans on

ORM and Database Abstraction Tools Cheat Sheetthe Basic CRUD Operations and Transactions tables hold the bulk-insert and unit-of-work rows this recipe links back to.
Database Query Optimization Cheat Sheetbackground on batch-load performance patterns that hold across database engines, beyond what any one ORM's own docs show.

6 steps

Checked 18 Aug 2026

Part of the ORM and Database Abstraction Tools cookbook