There are afaik several ways to do multi-record operations on DB. Mileage of course varies depending on DMBS.
Is AR capable of folding multi-record modifications (inserts, deletes or updates) to single SQL statement? Interface I had in mid was something like
with_lazy_write do massive_data.each { |item| MyModel.create_from(item) } end
which (depending on DB adapter) could boil down to something like these
INSERT INTO my_models SELECT ... UNION SELECT ... UNION SELECT ... INSERT INTO my_models VALUES (...), (...), (...), (...), (...), ...