Reading Excel Files And Loading Into The Database

Yesterday I spent most of the day reading everything I could find on the process of reading an excel file.
I have worked with writing models out to excel from cgridview pages, it was pretty easy.

Reading turned out to be a bit more challenging. I got it to work using phpexcel extension but found the pathing and
the setup of the extension to be a bit fragile. The auto load feature of PHPExcel and the pathing seemed to work
one minute and break the next.

It was trying to use __FILE__ to read and write when I was using a different directory from my application/module/view...

I have seen other people try to simplify this process and I now understand why. It should not be that hard.

I don't feel I have the expertise to create a new module or extend this PHPExcel module to clean it up, but I would
welcome the opportunity to work with anyone to do so.

So now I have my file being read and I display it in the view. It is a memory hog (21MB to load a 60kb file) but it runs pretty fast. I have not played with it to see how it scales. I have experienced some problems with writing excel files from within Yii with just 3000 rows / 20 columns....but that is another thread.

I need to create a few features to make it user friendly.

What I am looking for is best practice to load data into a table.

Is there any advantage to creating an array and doing an insert versus updating each cell?
$model = new Model();
for each row
$model->colA($cellvalueA);
$model->colB($cellvalueB);
$model->colC($cellvalueC);
$model->save();

versus using sql command

$command->insert('table', array(
'colA'=>$cellvalueA,
'colB'=>$cellvalueB,
'colC'=>$cellvalueC,
));