I know that both MySQL and Oracle provide command-line utilities that support "bulk" loading into a table from a text file (sqlload in Oracle, mysqlimport). Presumably other RDBM's have similar tools.

It is certainly true these utilities will operate a lot faster than looping over a large set of rows with an "insert" query in DBI, even when it's a prepared query with parameters.

So this would make it worthwhile, if appropriate within your application, to just dump your row-by-column array into a suitable text file, and run the appropriate import command in a "system()" or "exec()" or whatever.