Author: Written by Tom Lane, from an e-mail message dated 1999-12-05.
One may need to do a large number of table insertions when first populating a database. Here are some tips and techniques for making that as efficient as possible.
Turn off auto-commit and just do one commit at the end. Otherwise Postgres is doing a lot of work for each record added. In general when you are doing bulk inserts, you want to turn off some of the database features to gain speed.
Read the upstream documentation. For corrections, first check the current manual.