Oracle PL/SQL - Are NO_DATA_FOUND Exceptions bad for stored procedure performance?

Question

I\'m writing a stored procedure that needs to have a lot of conditioning in it. With the general knowledge from C#.NET coding that exceptions can hurt performance, I\'ve always

Answer 1

Since SELECT INTO assumes that a single row will be returned, you can use a statement of the form:

SELECT MAX(column)
  INTO var
  FROM table
 WHERE conditions;

IF var IS NOT NULL
THEN ...

The SELECT will give you the value if one is available, and a value of NULL instead of a NO_DATA_FOUND exception. The overhead introduced by MAX() will be minimal-to-zero since the result set contains a single row. It also has the advantage of being compact relative to a cursor-based solution, and not being vulnerable to concurrency issues like the two-step solution in the original post.