What is the best way to achieve speedy inserts of large amounts of data in MySQL?

Question

I have written a program in C to parse large XML files and then create files with insert statements. Some other process would ingest the files into a MySQL database. This

Answer 1

MySQL with the standard table formats is wonderfully fast as long as it's a write-only table; so the first question is whether you are going to be updating or deleting. If not, don't go with innosys - there's no need for locking if you are just appending. You can truncate or rename the output file periodically to deal with table size.