> One thing I noticed when working with Firebird is for mass imports, it is
> almost always much faster to lock the DB, deactivate keys and indexes,
> perform the mass operations, and reactivate all once you're over: rebuilding
> the constraints once beats maintaining them on a large set of operations.

I can attest to this, regardless of benchmarks :)

Me too. I recall in Oracle and Teradata (a datawarehousing DB), it was faster
to drop the indexes altogether, do the mass inserts/updates/whatever, then
rebuild the indexes after the fact.