Declaration of multiple values in Oracle BIND Variables

Question

I am trying to pass multiple values about 3000 values, to a BIND variable in Oracle SQL PLUS command prompt like..

SELECT JOB
  FROM EMP 
 WHERE JOB IN :JOB          


        

Answer 1

The first question I have to ask is this: where is this list of about 3000 values coming from? If it's coming from another table, then you can write something like the following:

SELECT JOB
  FROM EMP
 WHERE JOB IN (SELECT something FROM some_other_table WHERE ... )

For the rest of this answer, I'll assume it's not in the database anywhere.

In theory it's possible to do what you want. There are various ways to devise a query with a lot of bind variables in it. As an example, I'll write a script to query the all_objects data dictionary view using 3000 bind variables. I'm not going to write a SQL*Plus script with 3000 bind variables in it, so instead I wrote a Python script to generate this SQL*Plus script. Here it is:

ns = range(1, 9001, 3) # = 1, 4, 7, ..., 8998

# This gets rid of a lot of lines saying 'PL/SQL procedure successfully completed'.
print "SET FEEDBACK OFF;"
print

# Declare the bind variables and give them values.
for i, n in enumerate(ns):
    print "VARIABLE X%04d NUMBER;" % i
    print "EXEC :X%04d := %d;" % (i, n)
    print

query = "SELECT object_name FROM all_objects WHERE"

# Break up the query into lines to avoid SQL*Plus' limit of 2500 characters per line.
chunk_size = 100
for i in range(0, len(ns), chunk_size):
    query += "OR object_id IN (" + ",".join( ":X%04d" % j for j in range(i, i + chunk_size) ) + ")\n"

query = query.replace("WHEREOR", "WHERE") + ";\n"
print query

I was then able to run this script, redirect its output to a .sql file, and then run that .sql file in SQL*Plus.

You may notice above that I wrote 'In theory it's possible...'. I put the in theory clause there for a good reason. The query appears to be valid, and I don't know of a reason why it shouldn't execute. However, when I ran it on my Oracle instance (XE 11g Beta), I got the following output:

SQL> @genquery.sql
SELECT object_name FROM all_objects WHERE object_id IN (:X0000,:X0001,:X0002,:X0
003,:X0004,:X0005,:X0006,:X0007,:X0008,:X0009,:X0010,:X0011,:X0012,:X0013,:X0014
,:X0015,:X0016,:X0017,:X0018,:X0019,:X0020,:X0021,:X0022,:X0023,:X0024,:X0025,:X
0026,:X0027,:X0028,:X0029,:X0030,:X0031,:X0032,:X0033,:X0034,:X0035,:X0036,:X003
7,:X0038,:X0039,:X0040,:X0041,:X0042,:X0043,:X0044,:X0045,:X0046,:X0047,:X0048,:
X0049,:X0050,:X0051,:X0052,:X0053,:X0054,:X0055,:X0056,:X0057,:X0058,:X0059,:X00
60,:X0061,:X0062,:X0063,:X0064,:X0065,:X0066,:X0067,:X0068,:X0069,:X0070,:X0071,
:X0072,:X0073,:X0074,:X0075,:X0076,:X0077,:X0078,:X0079,:X0080,:X0081,:X0082,:X0
083,:X0084,:X0085,:X0086,:X0087,:X0088,:X0089,:X0090,:X0091,:X0092,:X0093,:X0094
,:X0095,:X0096,:X0097,:X0098,:X0099)
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-03113: end-of-file on communication channel
Process ID: 556
Session ID: 137 Serial number: 29

The ORA-03113 error indicates that the server process crashed.

I tried several variations on this:

• not using bind variables at all (i.e. putting the values in directly)
• not using IN lists, i.e. writing SELECT ... FROM all_objects WHERE object_id=:X0000 OR object_id=:X0001 OR ...,
• using OMG Ponies' approach,
• using OMG Ponies' approach without using bind variables,
• copying the data out of all_objects into a table, and querying that instead.

All of the above approaches caused an ORA-03113 error.

Of course, I don't know whether other editions of Oracle will suffer from these crashes (I don't have access to any other editions), but it doesn't bode well.

EDIT: You ask if you can achieve something like SELECT JOB FROM EMP WHERE JOB IN (:JOB). The short answer to that is no. SQL*Plus's usage message for the VARIABLE command is as follows:

Usage: VAR[IABLE] [  [ NUMBER | CHAR | CHAR (n [CHAR|BYTE]) |
                    VARCHAR2 (n [CHAR|BYTE]) | NCHAR | NCHAR (n) |
                    NVARCHAR2 (n) | CLOB | NCLOB | BLOB | BFILE
                    REFCURSOR | BINARY_FLOAT | BINARY_DOUBLE ] ]

All of the above types are single data values, with the exception of REFCURSOR, but SQL*Plus still seems to treat that as a single value. I can't find a way to query data returned in a REFCURSOR this way.

So in summary, what you're attempting to achieve is almost certainly impossible. I don't know what your ultimate aim is here, but I don't think you'll be able to do it using a single query in SQL*Plus.