Best practice/scalable way to mass update tier prices?

Question

In a Magento CE 1.9 shop, I need to update the prices & tier prices for a few thousand products daily.

The product prices I can update easily using the following helper function

Mage::getSingleton('catalog/product_action')
    ->updateAttributes(array($productId), array('price' => $price), 0);

To update the tier prices I unfortunately have to rely on the following which probably isn't very scalable as the whole product is saved every time:

$tierPrices = array();
$tierPrices[] = array(
    'website_id' => 0,
    'cust_group' => 32000, // "All Groups"
    'price_qty' => $qty,
    'price' => $price
);

$product->setTierPrice($tierPrices)->save();

Is there a better way to update the tier prices?

Answer 1

The best way to update tier prices in bulk (as any batch of data in Magento) is to use direct database communication approach. In your case I would do the following:

1. Create a new temporary table into which I would put all the prepared data for update, that will have only primary key on website_id, customer_group_id and entity_id. And it will have qty and price columns as non-indexed values (helps with write performance)
2. Put all the data for import into created table.
3. Trigger singe INSERT ... FROM SELECT ... ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE for catalog/product_tier_price table, that will replace/insert your pricing information for the product. Additionally, you can perform DELETE FROM SELECT before adding data for cleaning up previously set values.
4. Invoke price re-indexation for updated products.