Installing and using MySQL driver in Linux
apt-get install libmysql-java jdbc2xml ... --jdbc-drivers /usr/share/java/mysql-connector-java.jar
Optimizing INSERT performance
Unfortunately mysqld can be quite slow when INSERTing large numbers of rows.
We found the hint from this Stackoverflow article quite effective:
The innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit setting should be set to 2 (in the [mysqld] section of my.cnf):
[mysqld] # ... innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 2
Unfortunaltely the MySQL server has to be restarted for this change to take effect.