Newb: load lots of data into database

This is similar to a problem I had normalizing data for neural
network training. Ruby is very good at handling csv data and you can
use ActiveRecord outside of rails. My recommendation to you would be
to write a script to read in the data (File and IO are the primary
classes), using ActiveRecord. Using active record would allow you to
use your object models to insert the data into the data base.

If you have a lot of data, and going model by model would be too
slow, you will want to look at the DBI interface. I don't know of a
good Ruby SQL loader.

http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/166724 http://rails.aizatto.com/2007/05/21/activerecord-without-rails/