Clarification regading the performance of REGEXP functions

Question

I was asked to do a performance comparison between the REGEXP functions in perl and the one in oracle database .
I am using Oracle 11.1.0.6 version database for the same .
Here is the sample code that I used to replace fragements in a string with appropriate values .
"code" is the string and I'm replacing sub-strings inside it which are wrapped within $$ symblos with the appropriate values("repl_value") from the Associative array ("name_value").
code VARCHAR2(4000) := 'INSERT /*+ APPEND */ INTO $$T:LOCATIONS[1]$$($$C:LOCATIONS[1]:LOCATION_ID[1]$$,$$C:LOCATIONS[1]:LOCATION_CODE[1]$$,$$C:LOCATIONS[1]:ADDRESS[1]$$)SELECT $$S:LOCATIONS_S[1]$$.nextval,UNIQ_LOCATION_CODE,US FROM ( SELECT DISTINCT $$C:DEPT[1]:LOCATION_CODE[1]$$uniq_location_code FROM   $$T:DEPT[1]$$ dpt WHERE  $$C:DEPT[1].LOCATION_CODE[1]$$ NOT IN ( SELECT $$C:LOCATIONS[1].LOCATION_CODE[1]$$ FROM   $$T:LOCATIONS[1]$$ loc2)) uniq_loc';
BEGIN
WHILE (REGEXP_SUBSTR(code,'\$\$') IS NOT NULL) LOOP
              value := REGEXP_SUBSTR(code,'\$\$[^\$]*\$\$');
              value := REGEXP_REPLACE(value,'\$\$.*?([_[:alnum:]]+)(\[1\])?\$\$','\1');
              repl_value := name_value(value);
              code := REGEXP_REPLACE(code,'\$\$[^\$]*\$\$',repl_value,1,1);
        END LOOP;The code was working fine and I tried running the code 100000 times and it took around 6 minutes .
I also coded the same in perl and for the same 100000 times it took only 20 seconds .
I just want to know whether I have introduced any piece of code which acts as a performance bottleneck ? Let me know whether the pl/sql coding I have done is effective or not ?

Answer 1

We have a xml file where these code fragments will be within the tags . I have to get these code fragments and replace the strings wrapped in $$ symbols with the appropriate object names from the staging dictionary .
For this we are analyzing the performance using various methods and I was asked to test it in pl/sql and perl . I just created a proto-type where I am hard-coding the values in associative array and passing them to a function which replaces the fragments in the string with values of the associative array . Since the tables were present in the database I thought there would be no question about Pl/sql high performance but using regexp in perl proved to be many times faster than pl/sql .
Thats why I just wanted to clarify if there is any performance bottlenecks in the way I have coded in pl/sql . Can someone help me regarding this ?