Bulk Insert into Oracle database: Which is better: FOR Cursor loop or a simple Select?

Question

Which would be a better option for bulk insert into an Oracle database ? A FOR Cursor loop like

DECLARE
   CURSOR C1 IS SELECT * FROM FOO;
BEGIN
   FOR C1_R         


        

Answer 1

The general rule-of-thumb is, if you can do it using a single SQL statement instead of using PL/SQL, you should. It will usually be more efficient.

However, if you need to add more procedural logic (for some reason), you might need to use PL/SQL, but you should use bulk operations instead of row-by-row processing. (Note: in Oracle 10g and later, your FOR loop will automatically use BULK COLLECT to fetch 100 rows at a time; however your insert statement will still be done row-by-row).

e.g.

DECLARE
   TYPE tA IS TABLE OF FOO.A%TYPE INDEX BY PLS_INTEGER;
   TYPE tB IS TABLE OF FOO.B%TYPE INDEX BY PLS_INTEGER;
   TYPE tC IS TABLE OF FOO.C%TYPE INDEX BY PLS_INTEGER;
   rA tA;
   rB tB;
   rC tC;
BEGIN
   SELECT * BULK COLLECT INTO rA, rB, rC FROM FOO;
   -- (do some procedural logic on the data?)
   FORALL i IN rA.FIRST..rA.LAST
      INSERT INTO BAR(A,
                      B,
                      C)
      VALUES(rA(i),
             rB(i),
             rC(i));
END;

The above has the benefit of minimising context switches between SQL and PL/SQL. Oracle 11g also has better support for tables of records so that you don't have to have a separate PL/SQL table for each column.

Also, if the volume of data is very great, it is possible to change the code to process the data in batches.

Answer 2

If your rollback segment/undo segment can accomodate the size of the transaction then option 2 is better. Option 1 is useful if you do not have the rollback capacity needed and have to break the large insert into smaller commits so you don't get rollback/undo segment too small errors.