Using “IN” in a WHERE clause where the number of items in the set is very large

Question

I have a situation where I need to do an update on a very large set of rows that I can only identify by their ID (since the target records are selected by the user and have noth

Answer 1

I would always use

WHERE id IN (1,2,3,4,.....10000)

unless your in clause was stupidly large, which shouldn't really happen from user input.

edit: For instance, Rails does this a lot behind the scenes

It would definitely not be better to do separate update statements in a single transaction.