IDEA vs Navicat: Performance Comparison for Executing Large SQL Files

The author, a self‑described architect, discovered that IntelliJ IDEA executes large SQL files more efficiently than the dedicated tool Navicat.

Using Navicat to run a 90.1 MB SQL dump caused high CPU usage (total ~368 % across processes), severe heating, and the application froze after about 20.5 minutes, yielding an execution speed of roughly 4.4 MB/min.

Running a similar 98.8 MB file with IDEA’s database console kept CPU usage low (around 44 % for IDEA itself), maintained moderate temperature without a fan, completed in 17 minutes and achieved about 5.8 MB/min, with no freezing observed.

When executing an even larger 1.83 GB SQL file in IDEA, the process finished in 1 hour 19 minutes, delivering an impressive 23.47 MB/min while CPU usage stayed around 140 % total, again without any hangs.

The author speculates that Navicat may employ multi‑threading and per‑statement logging that increase overhead, whereas IDEA processes batches of 1,000 statements before logging and avoids extra thread‑management costs, resulting in lower CPU consumption and higher throughput.

Conclusion: For massive SQL imports, IDEA outperforms Navicat in speed, stability, and resource usage, making it the recommended tool for database migration tasks.

Source: Juejin article by "掘金online".