Bulk Insert into Oracle database Which is better FOR Cursor loop or a simple Select

Question

Which would be a better option for bulk insert into an Oracle database    A FOR Cursor loop like  DECLARE    CURSOR C1 IS SELECT   FROM FOO  BEGIN    FOR C1 REC IN C1 LOOP    INSERT INTO BAR A                  B                  C            VALUES C1 A                   C1 B                   C1 C      END LOOP  END   or a simple select  like   INSERT INTO BAR A                  B                  C           SELECT A                  B                  C         FROM FOO     Any specific reason either one would be better

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You can use   Bulk collect along with FOR ALL that is called Bulk binding    Because PL SQL forall operator speeds 30x faster for simple table inserts    BULK COLLECT and Oracle FORALL together these two features are known as Bulk Binding  Bulk Binds are a PL SQL technique where  instead of multiple individual SELECT  INSERT  UPDATE or DELETE statements are executed to retrieve from  or store data in  at table  all of the operations are carried out at once  in bulk  This avoids the context-switching you get when the PL SQL engine has to pass over to the SQL engine  then back to the PL SQL engine  and so on  when you individually access rows one at a time  To do bulk binds with INSERT  UPDATE  and DELETE statements  you enclose the SQL statement within a PL SQL FORALL statement  To do bulk binds with SELECT statements  you include the BULK COLLECT clause in the SELECT statement instead of using INTO   It improves performance

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I do neither for a daily complete reload of data  For example say I am loading my Denver site  There are other strategies for near real time deltas   I use a create table SQL as I have found is just almost as fast as a bulk load  For example  below a create table statement is used to stage the data  casting the columns to the correct data type needed   CREATE TABLE sales dataTemp as select cast  column1 as Date  as SALES QUARTER  cast  sales as number  as SALES IN MILLIONS       FROM   TABLE1   this temporary table mirrors my target table s structure exactly which is list partitioned by site  I then do a partition swap with the DENVER partition and I have a new data set

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I would recommend the Select option because cursors take longer  Also using the Select is much easier to understand for anyone who has to modify your query

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If your rollback segment undo segment can accomodate the size of the transaction then option 2 is better   Option 1 is useful if you do not have the rollback capacity needed and have to break the large insert into smaller commits so you don t get rollback undo segment too small errors

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The general rule-of-thumb is  if you can do it using a single SQL statement instead of using PL SQL  you should  It will usually be more efficient   However  if you need to add more procedural logic  for some reason   you might need to use PL SQL  but you should use bulk operations instead of row-by-row processing   Note  in Oracle 10g and later  your FOR loop will automatically use BULK COLLECT to fetch 100 rows at a time  however your insert statement will still be done row-by-row    e g   DECLARE    TYPE tA IS TABLE OF FOO A TYPE INDEX BY PLS INTEGER     TYPE tB IS TABLE OF FOO B TYPE INDEX BY PLS INTEGER     TYPE tC IS TABLE OF FOO C TYPE INDEX BY PLS INTEGER     rA tA     rB tB     rC tC  BEGIN    SELECT   BULK COLLECT INTO rA  rB  rC FROM FOO     --  do some procedural logic on the data      FORALL i IN rA FIRST  rA LAST       INSERT INTO BAR A                        B                        C        VALUES rA i                rB i                rC i    END    The above has the benefit of minimising context switches between SQL and PL SQL  Oracle 11g also has better support for tables of records so that you don t have to have a separate PL SQL table for each column   Also  if the volume of data is very great  it is possible to change the code to process the data in batches

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As you can see by reading the other answers  there are a lot of options available  If you are just doing  lt  10k rows you should go with the second option    In short  for approx   10k all the way to say a  lt 100k  It is kind of a gray area  A lot of old geezers will bark at big rollback segments  But honestly hardware and software have made amazing progress to where you may be able to get away with option 2 for a lot of records if you only run the code a few times  Otherwise you should probably commit every 1k-10k or so rows  Here is a snippet that I use  I like it because it is short and I don t have to declare a cursor  Plus it has the benefits of bulk collect and forall   begin     for r in  select rownum rn  t   from foo t  loop         insert into bar  A B C  values  r A r B r C           if mod rn 1000  0 then             commit          end if      end      commit  end    I found this link from the oracle site that illustrates the options in more detail

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A simple insert select like your 2nd option is far preferable   For each insert in the 1st option you require a context switch from pl sql to sql   Run each with trace tkprof and examine the results   If  as Michael mentions  your rollback cannot handle the statement then have your dba give you more   Disk is cheap  while partial results that come from inserting your data in multiple passes is potentially quite expensive    There is almost no undo associated with an insert

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I think that in this question is missing one important information   How many records will you insert    If from 1 to cca  10 000 then you should use SQL statement  Like they said it is easy to understand and it is easy to write   If from cca  10 000 to cca  100 000 then you should use cursor  but you should add logic to commit on every 10 000 records   If from cca  100 000 to millions then you should use bulk collect for better performance

[sql] Bulk Insert into Oracle database: Which is better: FOR Cursor loop or a simple Select?

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