Is there a bulk update statement in 11g?

Question

Hi everyone,
This is a pretty simple request but I cannot seem to find any documentation for it (at least on the 11g DB version).
I have a simple update statement:
UPDATE W_AP_XACT_FS SET DATASOURCE_NUM_ID = 5;
COMMIT;It probably seems strange why I would want to do that, but suffice it to say that I have no control over what value gets loaded into that column, however, I do need to correct it.
Either way, I want to make the above statement as efficient as possible.
What's the fastest way to perform a quick static update like that? Is there such a thing as a bulk update statement?
Thanks for the help!
-Joe

Answer 1

I need something that works 100% of the time and doesn't hang & create a DB lock.It has to lock the records it's updating until you commit. You could commit more frequently via a procedural approach but that is generally considered a bad idea because it's slower, takes more resources and risks 'snapshot too old' errors. 'Hanging' can mean a number of things, so I'm not sure which scenario you need to avoid here apart from the update taking a long time. Maybe it's just processing a lot of rows, in which case you might be able to throw some more resources at it with parallel DML. Or maybe it's blocked by another session, in which case you can find out a lot from v$session, v$lock, dba_blockers etc.
UPDATE W_AP_XACT_FS SET DATASOURCE_NUM_ID = 5;Could there ever be any rows prior to the update that already have DATASOURCE_NUM_ID = 5? If so, adding
WHERE datasource_num_id != 5;(if datasource_num_id is mandatory) or something like
WHERE datasource_num_id != 5
OR    datasource_num_id IS NULL;(if it's nullable) would reduce the number of rows needing to be processed.
Edited by: William Robertson on Aug 1, 2010 8:07 PM