Hello,
You do not state just how many rows is Too many
. Just did almost 82,000 but you may be talking of millions.
If you are talking of importing into HSQLDB embedded and you have a great amount of data, you need to consider another database. HSQLDB embedded is prone to problems with large amounts of data - possible loss of data.
There are no built in methods within Base for importing via csv files. Even using Calc, large file imports can take a long time. See my answer in this post → How to import a big amount of data into LibreOffice Base.
If you go through the results you will see much in the way of variations depending upon the DB. Best (from tests done) was PostgreSQL. Using pgAdmin III was able to, using pre-defined table, import the 81,000+ record csv file directly. This complete import (table defined already) seemed like less time than opening the csv file in Calc (did not actually time it).