How to speed up insertion performance in PostgreSQL

Question

I am testing Postgres insertion performance. I have a table with one column with number as its data type. There is an index on it as well. I filled the database up using thi

Answer 1

If you happend to insert colums with UUIDs (which is not exactly your case) and to add to @Dennis answer (I can't comment yet), be advise than using gen_random_uuid() (requires PG 9.4 and pgcrypto module) is (a lot) faster than uuid_generate_v4()

=# explain analyze select uuid_generate_v4(),* from generate_series(1,10000);
                                                        QUERY PLAN
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Function Scan on generate_series  (cost=0.00..12.50 rows=1000 width=4) (actual time=11.674..10304.959 rows=10000 loops=1)
 Planning time: 0.157 ms
 Execution time: 13353.098 ms
(3 filas)

vs

=# explain analyze select gen_random_uuid(),* from generate_series(1,10000);
                                                        QUERY PLAN
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Function Scan on generate_series  (cost=0.00..12.50 rows=1000 width=4) (actual time=252.274..418.137 rows=10000 loops=1)
 Planning time: 0.064 ms
 Execution time: 503.818 ms
(3 filas)

Also, it's the suggested official way to do it

Note

If you only need randomly-generated (version 4) UUIDs, consider using the gen_random_uuid() function from the pgcrypto module instead.

This droped insert time from ~2 hours to ~10 minutes for 3.7M of rows.