[segmondy]

It's not a proposal, it's common knowledge. INSERTS causes the index to be rebuilt. You have to search and find the right location then insert the new pointer. If you do 1,000,000 inserts that's 1,000,000 searches and writes to the index.

[ninkendo]

Sure INSERTs do, but I personally would have guessed COPY does its work in a single transaction, which under the scenes I would hope would avoid rebuilding the index until the transaction is committed?

I admit there’s no reason to expect this other than “so you don’t have to do the dumb drop/recreate indexes” trick... maybe I just expected COPY to be smarter than just expanding into a set of insert statements.