I'm currently working on an application for the iPhone/iPod touch and
decided to use SQLite as storage for the data. The app will display medical eponyms and must fill the database on first launch and when new eponym data is available from an XML file. It parses the XML file and fills the SQLite database, which currently results in 27 entries to a categories table, 1'623 entries to the eponyms table and 3'281 entries to a linker table
(4'931 entries in total). The whole database weighs only 394 KB.
Read the full article to see how I sped up the import process by a magnitude of more than 10.
Rafael: Thank you very much, I was having a huge headache to solve the very same problem!