D1 rejects your giant multi-row INSERT: "too many terms in compound SELECT"

verbatim errorD1_ERROR: too many terms in compound SELECT

Problem

A one-off backfill script pushed 2,000 rows in a single statement:

INSERT INTO events (id, kind, ts) VALUES (?, ?, ?), (?, ?, ?), ...

D1 rejected it with:

D1_ERROR: too many terms in compound SELECT

The same statement had worked fine in sqlite3 on my laptop, which cost me an hour of blaming the driver.

Root cause

SQLite compiles multi-row VALUES lists into a compound SELECT with one term per row, and SQLITE_MAX_COMPOUND_SELECT defaults to 500 terms. Two thousand tuples means two thousand terms, over the limit. Local sqlite CLI builds often ship with different limits than D1's runtime, so a statement that works locally can fail remotely by construction, not by corruption.

fix preview — first 3 of 11 lines (ts), truncated:

const CHUNK = 100; // well under the 500-term compound limit
const stmts = [];
for (let i = 0; i < rows.length; i += CHUNK) {
… 8 more lines in the fix

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