Insert large collections

Question

Oh great Oracle gurus...
How do I insert into collections (varrays or nested tables) where I have more than 1000 members in the collection? I am having a problem where I have carefully built an insert statement which gathers up all the members of a collection and tries to insert them as a single statement. When I get a large number of members to the collection I am getting an error message ORA-00939: too many arguments for function.
I assume that I can insert numerous times into a nested table but am not sure exactly how to do this (the samples in the documentation seem to be vague). However the documentation says that a varray must be inserted as a unit.
Cameron

Answer 1

Hi,
The docs say an expression list can't contain any more than 1000 expressions, so I would guess this it the limit you'll be hitting here.
However, in my testing I can't insert any more than 999 elements in a nested table using an expression list. With 1000 elements:
[email protected](161)> create type nt_type is table of varchar2(10);
  2  /
Type created.
[email protected](161)> create table test (x int, y nt_type) nested table y store as test_y;
Table created.
[email protected](161)> @ed
  1  declare
  2     sql_stmt varchar2(32767);
  3  begin
  4     sql_stmt := 'insert into test (x, y) values (1, nt_type(';
  5     for i in 1 .. 999 loop
  6        sql_stmt := sql_stmt || '''hello'',';
  7     end loop;
  8     sql_stmt := sql_stmt || '''hello''))';
  9     execute immediate sql_stmt;
10* end;
11  /
declare
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-00939: too many arguments for function
ORA-06512: at line 9However, if I try to insert only 999 elements:
[email protected](161)> ed
Wrote file TEST.BRANDT_161_20070322212141.sql
  1  declare
  2     sql_stmt varchar2(32767);
  3  begin
  4     sql_stmt := 'insert into test (x, y) values (1, nt_type(';
  5     for i in 1 .. 998 loop
  6        sql_stmt := sql_stmt || '''hello'',';
  7     end loop;
  8     sql_stmt := sql_stmt || '''hello''))';
  9     execute immediate sql_stmt;
10* end;
[email protected](161)> /
PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.
[email protected](161)> select * from test;
         X Y
         1
NT_TYPE('hello', 'hello', 'hello', 'hello', 'hello', 'hello
', 'hello', 'hello', 'hello', 'hello')
[email protected](161)> select cardinality(y) from test;
CARDINALITY(Y)
           999Maybe you could try a temporary table approach:
[email protected](161)> delete from test;
1 row deleted.
[email protected](161)> create global temporary table gtt(y varchar2(10)) on commit delete rows;
Table created.
[email protected](161)> insert into gtt(y)
  2     select 'hello'
  3     from dual
  4     connect by level <= 2000;
2000 rows created.
[email protected](161)> insert into test(x, y) values (1, (select cast(collect(y) as nt_type) from gtt));
1 row created.
Elapsed: 00:00:00.07
[email protected](161)> select cardinality(y) from test;
CARDINALITY(Y)
          2000
Elapsed: 00:00:00.01
[email protected](161)> commit;
Commit complete.
Elapsed: 00:00:00.01
[email protected](161)> select * from gtt;
no rows selectedI must say, though... a nested table with more than 1000 elements sounds to me like it should just be a "table".
cheers,
Anthony