Re: newbie question - still: please help

Daniel,

Your gut reaction is right on-target. It is always a struggle to keep certain folks from killing the entire village while trying to cure a single case of the sniffles. What's worse is that such folks are usually quite bright and talented. After, very few mediocre folks can either cure the sniffles or kill entire villages... ;-)

Longer response: This is a common argument that eventually distills down to something like "I don't need a stupid database engine to do this. I can do it all in (choose one): C, C++, Perl, shell script, Java." What the person has to realize is that those 'stupid database engines' started out as lone programmers doing what he is describing but then running into problems such as transaction recoverability (aka rollback), concurrency, and its close cousin read-consistency. Oh yeah, and then there is also what my good friend Gary once called "DFB" or "diddly file build-up" (i.e. an excess of "diddly files" in a file-system), which very few people see up front but invariably grows to dominate such approaches. After some decades of effort by thousands of developers and designers (very few of whom are stupid), what results is the modern database engine. Such people who think they can outperform database engines without losing such crucial features do not have any sense of humility about their place in the world. Ask him to skim through Gray and Reuter's "Principles of Transaction Processing" to gain some of that humility...

Shorter response: look into using PL/SQL bulk-bind operations (i.e. FORALL, BULK COLLECT, etc) instead of one-row-at-a-time processing.

I suspect the latter approach will be more effective... :-)

Hope this helps...and keep up the good work!

-Tim

• Original Message ----- To: "Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L" <ORACLE-L_at_fatcity.com> Sent: Monday, January 13, 2003 9:14 AM

> hi!
>
> a DBA inteds to speed up a script that is looping and
> sending hundred thousands of sequential update statements like:
>
> UPDATE ISIS_DOCAR SET STATUS = 2000 WHERE ID = n;
>
> he suggests copying the table to a file, change it and then
> load it into the DB again. i am strongly convinced that this
> is nonsense.
>
> what is the best way to go for a script like this, doing tons of
> updates? (except convincing him to swith to sell burgers)
>
>
> thx
> daniel
> --
> Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net
> --
> Author: Daniel Wisser
> INET: daniel.wisser_at_isis-papyrus.com
>
> Fat City Network Services -- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com
> San Diego, California -- Mailing list and web hosting services
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message
> to: ListGuru_at_fatcity.com (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in
> the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L
> (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may
> also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).
>

-- 
Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net
-- 
Author: Tim Gorman
  INET: Tim_at_SageLogix.com

Fat City Network Services    -- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com
San Diego, California        -- Mailing list and web hosting services
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message
to: ListGuru_at_fatcity.com (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in
the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L
(or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from).  You may
also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).