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RE: IN vs. EXISTS

From: <Rick_Cale_at_teamhealth.com>
Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2002 12:23:55 -0800
Message-ID: <F001.004EDCDF.20021018122355@fatcity.com>

Dennis,

I have read about NOT IN. Oracle doc says the following but not conclusive

"In certain circumstances, it is better to use IN rather than EXISTS. In general, if the selective predicate is in the subquery, then use IN. If the selective predicate is in the parent query, then use EXISTS. "

It appears in my ex. using exists that Oracle will evaluate all 100 million records to see if it gets deleted
Whereas the WHERE IN will use the PK index to locate the rows to be deleted

Thanks
Rick

                                                                                                                    
                    DENNIS WILLIAMS                                                                                 
                    <DWILLIAMS_at_LIFE       To:     Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L <ORACLE-L_at_fatcity.com>       
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                    Sent by:              Subject:     RE: IN vs. EXISTS                                            
                    root_at_fatcity.co                                                                                 
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                    10/18/2002                                                                                      
                    03:53 PM                                                                                        
                    Please respond                                                                                  
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Rick - I would check the EXPLAIN PLAN for both queries, and see whether Oracle uses a different query plan. Usually the prescription for better SQL performance is to avoid NOT IN, as the following snippet that I snagged off the 'net explains.

Use NOT EXISTS in Place of NOT IN
In sub-query statements such as the following, the NOT IN clause causes an internal sort/merge. The NOT IN clause is the all-time slowest test possible
as it forces a full read of the table in the sub-query SELECT. Avoid using NOT IN clause either by replacing it with Outer Joins or with a NOT EXISTS clause

Dennis Williams
DBA, 40%OCP
Lifetouch, Inc.
dwilliams_at_lifetouch.com

-----Original Message-----

Sent: Friday, October 18, 2002 1:32 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

Hi All,

I have 2 tables

BIG - 100 million records
SMALL - 1 million records.

I want to delete all the records in BIG that are in small. There is a PK on field1.
Which of the below methods would you choose and why?

DELETE FROM big
WHERE field1 IN (SELECT field1 FROM small);

DELETE FROM big a
WHERE EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM small B

                                    WHERE b.field1 = a.field1);

Thanks
Rick

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Author:
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Author: DENNIS WILLIAMS
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Author:
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