Ormlite Android bulk inserts

I've had the same problem, and found a reasonable workaround. This took insert time from 2 seconds to 150ms:

final OrmLiteSqliteOpenHelper myDbHelper = ...;final SQLiteDatabase db = myDbHelper.getWritableDatabase();db.beginTransaction();try{    // do ormlite stuff as usual, no callBatchTasks() needed    db.setTransactionSuccessful();}finally {    db.endTransaction();}

Update:

Just tested this on Xperia M2 Aqua (Android4.4/ARM) and callBatchTasks() is actually faster. 90ms vs 120ms. So I think more details are in order.

We have 3 tables/classes/DAOs: Parent, ChildWrapper, Child.
Relations: Parent to ChildWrapper - 1 to n, ChildWrapper to Child - n to 1.
Code goes like this:

void saveData(xml){    for (parents in xml){        parentDao.createOrUpdate(parent);        for (children in parentXml){            childDao.createOrUpdate(child);            childWrapperDao.createOrUpdate(generateWrapper(parent, child));        }    }}

I've got original speed up on a specific Android4.2/MIPS set-top-box (STB).callBatchTasks was the first option because that's what we use througout all the code and it works well.

parentDao.callBatchTasks(    // ...    saveData();    // ...);

But inserts were slow, so we've tried to nest callBatchTasks for every used DAO, set autocommit off, startThreadConnection and probably something else - don't remember at the moment. To no avail.

From my own experience and other similar posts it seems the problem occurs when several tables/DAOs are involved and it has something to do with implemetation specifics of Android (or SQLite) for concrete devices.

Unfortunately, this may be "expected". I get similar performance when I do that number of inserts under my emulator as well. The batch-tasks and turning off auto-commit don't seem to help.

If you are looking to load a large amount of data into a database, you might consider replaying a database dump instead. See here:

Android OrmLite pre-populate database

My guess would be that you are slowing somewhat because you are doing two IO tasks at one time (at least in the code shown above). You are reading from a file and writing to a database (which is a file). Also, from what I understand transactions should be a reasonable size. 1600 seems like a very high number. I would start with 100 but play around with the size.

So essentially I suggest you "chunk" your reads and inserts.

Read 100 lines to a temp Array, then insert that 100. Then read the next 100, then insert, etc.