I want to do them in a multi insert transaction block for speed so that the indexes are only updated once after all inserts.
Eh, this is the first time I hear that MySQL only updates indices on a commit. 
    for 1...100000 {
        $insert_sth->execute($_);
   }

[download]
Forget about indices and transactions. You're problem is doing 100000 queries. 100000 times the latency between your application and the database.

Want speed? Write a single statement* and execute that.

*If you would insert millions of integers, your query becomes larger than the max package size. Either increase that, or create a handful of statements, each slightly smaller than the max package size.

In reply to Re: correct way to do multi-insert/update transaction by JavaFan
in thread correct way to do multi-insert/update transaction by Anonymous Monk

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