I want to bulk insert about 700 records into the Android database on my next upgrade. What’s the most efficient way to do this? From various posts, I know that if I use Insert statements, I should wrap them in a transaction. There’s also a post about using your own database, but I need this data to go into my app’s standard Android database. Note that this would only be done once per device.
Some ideas:
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Put a bunch of SQL statements in a file, read them in a line at a time, and exec the SQL.
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Put the data in a CSV file, or JSON, or YAML, or XML, or whatever. Read a line at a time and do
db.insert(). -
Figure out how to do an import and do a single import of the entire file.
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Make a sqlite database containing all the records, copy that onto the Android device, and somehow merge the two databases.
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[EDIT] Put all the SQL statements in a single file in res/values as one big string. Then read them a line at a time and exec the SQL.
What’s the best way? Are there other ways to load data? Are 3 and 4 even possible?
I don’t believe there is any feasible way to accomplish #3 or #4 on your list.
Of the other solutions you list two that have the datafile contain direct SQL, and the other has the data in a non-SQL format.
All three would work just fine, but the latter suggestion of grabbing the data from a formatted file and building the SQL yourself seems the cleanest. If true batch update capability is added at a later date your datafile is still usable, or at least easily processable into a usable form. Also, creation of the datafile is more straightforward and less error prone. Finally, having the “raw” data would allow import into other data-store formats.
In any case, you should (as you mentioned) wrap the groups of inserts into transactions to avoid the per-row transaction journal creation.