When bulk copying data to a table, it is much faster if the destination table is index and constraint free, because it is cheaper to build an index once than maintain it over many inserts. For postgres, the pg_restore and SQL COPY commands can do this, but they both require that data be copied from the filesystem rather than directly from another table.
For table to table copying (and transformations) the situation isn’t as straight-forward. Recently I was working on a problem where we needed to perform some poor-man’s ETL, copying and transforming data between tables in different schemas. Since some of the destination tables were heavily indexed(including a full text index) the task took quite a while. In talking with a colleague about the problem, we came up with the idea of dropping the indexes and constraints prior to the data load, and restoring them afterwards.
First stop: how to get the DDL for indices on a table in postgres? Poking around the postgres catalogs, I managed to find a function pg_get_indexdef that would return the DDL for an index. Combining that with a query I found in a forum somewhere and altered, I came up with this query to get the names and DDL of all the indices on a table. (this one excludes the primary key index)
With that and the query to do the same for constraints its straightforward to build a helper function that will get the DDL for all indices and constraints, drop them, yield to evaluate a block and then restore the indices and constraints. The method is below:
Use of the function would look like the snippet below. This solution would also allow for arbitrarily complex transformations in Ruby as well as pure SQL.
For my task loading and transforming data into about 20 tables, doing this reduced the execution time by two-thirds. Of course, your mileage may vary depending how heavily indexed your destination tables are.
Here’s the whole module: