Question

can anyone explain why my inserts are taking so long in Ormlite? Doing 1,700 inserts in one sqlite transaction on the desktop takes less than a second. However, when using Ormlite for Android, it’s taking about 70 seconds, and I can see each insert in the debugging messages.

When I try and wrap the inserts into one transaction it goes at exactly the same speed. I understand that there is overhead both for Android and for Ormlite, however, I wouldn’t expect it to be that great. My code is below:

    this.db = new DatabaseHelper(getApplicationContext());
    dao = db.getAddressDao();
final BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(getResources().openRawResource(R.raw.poi)));
    try {
        dao.callBatchTasks(new Callable<Void>() {
            public Void call() throws Exception {
                String line;
                while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
                    String[] columns = line.split(",");
                    Address address = new Address();
                    // setup Address
                    dao.create(address);
                } 
            return null;
         }
        });
    } catch (SQLException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    } catch (Exception e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }

Answer 1

Unfortunately, this may be “expected”. I get similar performance when I do that number of inserts under my emulator as well. The batch-tasks and turning off auto-commit don’t seem to help.

If you are looking to load a large amount of data into a database, you might consider replaying a database dump instead. See here:

Android OrmLite pre-populate database