> Back in 1994 I was able to insert 1000 rows/secs into a IB database from an DBF file.

The 1994 DBF format probably still was Level 3. Even Level 4 would not
have been much different from a plain text file, and you would not
need any type of middleware to read them into whateveryouimagine.
It all became much more complicated with Level 5, which requires
either ODBC or the dreaded BDE.
Nothing is really fast (in today's terms) whenever one of them (or
both! yuk!) are involved.