Oracle PL/SQL - Are NO_DATA_FOUND Exceptions bad for stored procedure performance?

Question

I\'m writing a stored procedure that needs to have a lot of conditioning in it. With the general knowledge from C#.NET coding that exceptions can hurt performance, I\'ve always

Answer 1

Stephen Darlington makes a very good point, and you can see that if you change my benchmark to use a more realistically sized table if I fill the table out to 10000 rows using the following:

begin 
  for i in 2 .. 10000 loop
    insert into t (NEEDED_FIELD, cond) values (i, 10);
  end loop;
end;

Then re-run the benchmarks. (I had to reduce the loop counts to 5000 to get reasonable times).

declare
  otherVar  number;
  cnt number;
begin
  for i in 1 .. 5000 loop
     select count(*) into cnt from t where cond = 0;

     if (cnt = 1) then
       select NEEDED_FIELD INTO otherVar from t where cond = 0;
     else
       otherVar := 0;
     end if;
   end loop;
end;
/

PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.

Elapsed: 00:00:04.34

declare
  otherVar  number;
begin
  for i in 1 .. 5000 loop
     begin
       select NEEDED_FIELD INTO otherVar from t where cond = 0;
     exception
       when no_data_found then
         otherVar := 0;
     end;
   end loop;
end;
/

PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.

Elapsed: 00:00:02.10

The method with the exception is now more than twice as fast. So, for almost all cases,the method:

SELECT NEEDED_FIELD INTO var WHERE condition;
EXCEPTION
WHEN NO_DATA_FOUND....

is the way to go. It will give correct results and is generally the fastest.