How to seed Devise users efficiently? - mysql

Question

I'm trying to seed about 100,000 users using rake db:seed in my Rails 3 project and it is really slow!
Here's the code sample:
# ...
User.create!(
:display_name => "#{title} #{name} #{surname}",
:email => "#{name}.#{surname}_#{num}#localtinkers.com",
:password => '12341234'
)
It works, but it is really slow because for each user:
Devise issues a SELECT statement to find out if the email is already taken.
A separate INSERT statement is issued.
For other objects I use "ar-extensions" and "activerecord-import" gems as follows:
tags.each do |tag|
all_tags << Tag.new(:name => tag)
end
Tag.import(all_tags, :validate => false, :ignore => true)
The above creates just one INSERT statement for all the tags and it works really fast, just like MySql database restore from the SQL dump.
But for users I cannot do this because I need Devise to generate encrypted password, salt, etc for each user. Is there a way to generate them on the SQL side or are there other efficient ways of seeding users?
Thank you.

Answer 1

How about:
u = User.new(
:display_name => "#{title} #{name} #{surname}",
:email => "#{name}.#{surname}_#{num}#localtinkers.com",
:password => '12341234'
)
u.save!(:validate => false)
This should create and save the record without executing the validations, and therefore without checking for e-mail address uniqueness. Obviously the downside of this is that you're not being protected by any other validations on the user too, so make sure you check your data first!