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

If you were on Oracle, I'd recommend using table functions, similar to Marc Gravell's post.

-- first create a user-defined collection type, a table of numbers
create or replace type tbl_foo as table of number;

declare
  temp_foo tbl_foo;
begin
  -- this could be passed in as a parameter, for simplicity I am hardcoding it
  temp_foo := tbl_foo(7369, 7788);

  -- here I use a table function to treat my temp_foo variable as a table, 
  -- and I join it to the emp table as an alternative to a massive "IN" clause
  select e.*
    from emp e,
         table(temp_foo) foo
   where e.empno = foo.column_value;
end;