new records insertion into database table in my case - ruby-on-rails

Question

I am developing a Rails v2.3 application which is a service to search projects' information where projects info are stored in database.
There is an existing projects table in the database like following:
For the sake of satisfying customer’s requirement, this table needs to insert new data in the mid-night everyday.
The reason of creating these new records is to make the Rails application be able to search projects by a single word besides searching by the full name.
For example, if search by word "portal", both Car rental portal and Position track portal records should be found by the Rails application. That's the app.'s database needs to have all the records of each single word from project_name.
So, my plan is to generate those new records by spliting the value in project_name column (of the above projects table) into single words and then use each single word as a new record's project_name while keep other columns of the record unchanged.
For example, in above table, the first record has project_name "Car rental portal", what I gonna do is to split this string into 3 words and construct the following three new records to be inserted into the table:
To achieve this. I tried to make a rake task which gets all records from the original projects table, and for each record, the rake task splits the string value of project_name column into words, then construct the new records with words and insert into the table. My rake task looks like the code below:
all_records = ActiveRecord::Base.execute("select * from projects;")
all_records.each do |record|
user_id = record[0]
project_name=record[1]
department = record[2]
other = record[3]
words=project_name.split()
words.each do |word|
sql = "insert into project values (#{user_id},#{word},#{department},#{other});"
ActiveRecord::Base.execute(sql)
end
end
The rake task works well, it creates the expected new records and inserted into the projects table, BUT the problem is it takes 36 hours to complete!
It is understandable since the origin table is very very large, if split the string to words and create the new record it's like create a 3 times larger table (suppose each string of project_name has 3 words).
My question:
Could some Rails experts suggest me some more efficient way to achieve the new record insertion thing I described above?
Or any new way to enable single word search in my case? (That's do not use the way I designed to have each single word store in the database.)

Answer 1

If you do this only for searching purpose, why don't you use Sunspot ? It supports full text search.
Splitting project name sounds like a really bad idea for me.
But if you want to take it less time, then I'd encourage you to split this single task into more rake tasks, that would do the same, but for other set of projects.

Answer 2

For faster importing, you want to use activerecord-import, it will speed up your execution by a couple orders of magnitude.
columns = [:title, :project_name, :department, :other]
values = all_records.inject([]) do |values_arr, record|
user_id, project_name, department, other = record
project_name.split.each do |name|
values_arr << [user_id, name, department, other]
end
values_arr
end
class TempModel < ActiveRecord::Base; set_table_name "projects"; end
TempModel.import columns, values, :validate=>false