Multiple Dynamic Inserts with SQL

August 30, 2005 by Pete Freitag

If you have ever had to do lots of SQL INSERT statements you will know that they can get pretty slow. When looking for ways to speed up some inserts, I noticed that you can use a SELECT subquery to provide the values. Like this:

INSERT INTO foo_archive (id, title)
  SELECT id, title
  FROM foo

This should work on Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle.