Q: Newbie PL/SQL inquiry regarding existence check.

Respects to all Oracle experts.
I would like to find the most processing efficient solution to the following:

Assume a table of records.
I would like to query this table for the existence of one or more records meeting a WHERE clause criterion, and set a local PL/SQL variable to 1 if ANY records exist, and 0 if NO records exist.

For instance, I could use:

Select count(*) into <local_var> From <Table> Where <criteria>;

However, could this be a very costly query for a very large table?

Is there a better way....anyone?

Thanks in advance.
Posting and e-mail reply would be nice.

Mick Davies, mdavies_at_elekom.com Received on Tue Oct 07 1997 - 00:00:00 CDT