Bulk operations with ActiveRecord import

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Inserting thousands of records one-by-one is prohibitively slow due to the overhead of individual INSERT statements. The activerecord-import gem provides bulk insert capabilities that compile multiple records into a single multi-row INSERT, dramatically improving throughput. I use this for data imports, batch processing, or seeding test environments. The gem supports validations, callbacks (optionally), and conflict resolution strategies like on_duplicate_key_update. For maximum performance, I disable validations and callbacks when data is already trusted. The trade-off is that bulk operations bypass some ActiveRecord conveniences like after_create callbacks, so I handle those concerns separately if needed. Monitoring insertion rates helps identify when bulk operations are worth the complexity.