index.js

// data comes from here http://stat-computing.org/dataexpo/2009/the-data.html
// download 1994.csv.bz2 and unpack by running: cat 1994.csv.bz2 | bzip2 -d > 1994.csv
// 1994.csv should be ~5.2 million lines and 500MB
// importing all rows into leveldb took ~50 seconds on my machine

// there are two main techniques at work here:
// 1: never create JS objects, leave the data as binary the entire time (binary-split does this)
// 2: group lines into 16 MB batches, to take advantage of leveldbs batch API (byte-stream does this)

var level = require('level')
var byteStream = require('byte-stream')
var split = require('binary-split')
var fs = require('fs')

var count = 0
var wbs = 1024 * 1024 * 16
var db = level('data.db', {writeBufferSize: wbs}, function(){
  var batcher = byteStream(wbs)
  fs.createReadStream('1994.csv')
    .pipe(split())
    .pipe(batcher)
    .on('data', function(lines) {
      var batch = db.batch()
      for (var i = 0; i < lines.length; i++) {
        batch.put(count, lines[i])
        count++
      }
      batch.write(batcher.next.bind(batcher))
    })
})