A few weeks ago my friend Frank de Jonge told me he managed to improve an import into a MySQL server down from more than 10 hours to 16 minutes. According to him it had to do with several field types (too long fields to really small data), the amount of indexes, and constraints on the tables. We were talking about 1 million records here. He wondered if it was possible to make it even faster.

The basics

Turns out there are many ways of importing data into a database, it all depends where are you getting the data from and where you want to put it. Let me give you a bit more context: you may want to get data from a legacy application that exports into CSV to your database server or even data from different servers.

If you are pulling data from a MySQL table into another MySQL table (lets assume they are into different servers) you might as well use …