How to load data from a text file in a PostgreSQL database?

Question

The slightly modified version of COPY below worked better for me, where I specify the CSV format. This format treats backslash characters in text without any fuss. The default format is the somewhat quirky TEXT.

COPY myTable FROM '/path/to/file/on/server' ( FORMAT CSV, DELIMITER('|') );

Let consider that your data are in the file values.txt and that you want to import them in the database table myTable then the following query does the job

COPY myTable FROM 'value.txt' (DELIMITER('|'));

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/sql-copy.html

Check out the COPY command of Postgres:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/sql-copy.html

There's Pgloader that uses the aforementioned COPY command and which can load data from csv (and MySQL, SQLite and dBase). It's also using separate threads for reading and copying data, so it's quite fast (interestingly enough, it got written from Python to Common Lisp and got a 20 to 30x speed gain, see blog post).

To load the csv file one needs to write a little configuration file, like

LOAD CSV  
  FROM 'path/to/file.csv' (x, y, a, b, c, d)  
  INTO postgresql:///pgloader?csv (a, b, d, c)  
  …