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4.4. Populating a Table with Rows

The INSERT statement is used to populate a table with rows:

INSERT INTO weather VALUES ('San Francisco', 46, 50, 0.25, '1994-11-27');

You can also use COPY to load large amounts of data from flat (ASCII) files. This is usually faster because the data is read (or written) as a single atomic transaction directly to or from the target table. An example would be:

COPY weather FROM '/home/user/weather.txt' USING DELIMITERS '|';
where the path name for the source file must be available to the backend server machine, not the client, since the backend server reads the file directly.