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

How do you generate the IN clause?

If there is there another SELECT statement that generates those values, you could simply plug that into the UPDATE like so:

UPDATE TARGET_TABLE T
SET
  SOME_VALUE = 'Whatever'
WHERE T.ID_NUMBER IN(
                    SELECT ID_NUMBER  --this SELECT generates your ID #s.
                    FROM SOURCE_TABLE
                    WHERE SOME_CONDITIONS
                    )

In some RDBMses, you'll get better performance by using the EXISTS syntax, which would look like this:

UPDATE TARGET_TABLE T
SET
  SOME_VALUE = 'Whatever'
WHERE EXISTS (
             SELECT ID_NUMBER  --this SELECT generates your ID #s.
             FROM SOURCE_TABLE S
             WHERE SOME_CONDITIONS
               AND S.ID_NUMBER =  T.ID_NUMBER
             )