Mikael Carneholm wrote:
> I am responisble for an exciting project of evaluating migration of a
> medium/large application for a well-known swedish car&truck manufacturer
> ... The goal right now is to find the set of parameters that gives as
> short bulk insert time as possible, minimizing downtime while the data
> itself is migrated.
If you haven't explored the COPY command yet, check it out. It is stunningly fast compared to normal INSERT commands.
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/static/sql-copy.html
pg_dump and pg_restore make use of the COPY command. Since you're coming from a different vendor, you'd have to dump the data into a COPY-compatible set of files yourself. But it will be worth the effort.
Craig