spawn a process each to populate

Watch out with your DB-pool if populating includes writing back to the database ;)
the spawned processes will all run async and lock your DB up (unless you have some kind of hard-coded pool-size & queue on your ORM)

Killed some databases this way while running AWS-Lambdas once :p

sidenote: I absolutely adore how robust and efficient async in Erlang/Elixir is (when Supervisors are setup correctly) and that it's totally fine to just spawn x-thousand processes across processor cores or even different machines to deal with stuff!