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 use a table-variable / temp-table; insert the values into this, and join to it. Then you can use the same set multiple times. This works especially well if you are (for example) passing down a CSV of IDs as varchar. As a SQL Server example:

DECLARE @ids TABLE (id int NOT NULL)

INSERT @ids
SELECT value
FROM dbo.SplitCsv(@arg) // need to define separately

UPDATE t
SET    t. // etc
FROM   [TABLE] t
INNER JOIN @ids #i ON #i.id = t.id