+1 to the idea of bulk import via HFiles, that would be a lot better performance-wise compared to the current implementation. Note there is also a similar Pig JIRA open towards doing this outside of Phoenix https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/PIG-2921.

Follow-up question - is there a reason executeBatch() is not supported in Phoenix currently? Doing an executeBatch() should be better than going to the database on each individual row (using execute)?