I have a feature class with 1 million records. Which is the faster way to copy data to another feature class:
Feature Class to Feature Class or Insert Cursor?
[GIS] Which is the faster way to copy data to another feature class: Feature Class to Feature Class or Insert Cursor
arcpycursorfeature-classgeoprocessingperformance
Best Answer
I created three sample random point datasets - 10 features, 100k features, 1m features - and tested the following options
arcpy.Copy_management()
)arcpy.da.InsertCursor()
)arcpy.FeatureClassToFeatureClass_conversion()
)arcpy.CopyFeatures_management()
)Here are the results:
Copying 10 features
Feature class to feature class fastest, Copy slowest
Copying 100k features
Copy fastest, Insert Cursor slowest
Copying 1m features
Copy fastest, Insert Cursor slowest
Here is the code I used to test. I had to add an extra copy right at the start as I found the very first function I fired each time I ran the script took several seconds slower to run - not sure if that was due to first access of gdbs or arcpy or something else. Subsequent tools didn't take so long to run.
Just-in-case, to eliminate any possibly slowdown in the geodatabase I also ran each step individually, clearing out the geodatabase between each run. The results here were the same, so there didn't appear to be any slow-down affecting the later tools in the test.