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Question

Hi Everyone,
i am using oracle 9i and i have 20,000 records in my table and i have to do some manual changes in my address column. in the meanwhile i sort my data with respect to anyother column, after sort operation, i want to go back to that specific record where i was befroe sort operation. is there any way to get to that record if i didnt remember the idx adn anyother text. My concern is there any current record operation or anyother function which shuld directly take us to that record.
Best Regards,

Answer 1

The two biggest performance killers in Oracle in my experience are:
1. not using bind variables
2. treating data as records that needs to be processed on a row-by-row basis
What you describe sounds like #2. Not dealing with data sets, but with records. And doing multiple passes through the table do read and process and then re-process the exact same rows - again.
I/O is the single most expensive operation on a database computing platform. Why would you want to do multiple I/Os for processing and then re-processing the very same row?
This row-by-row processing method we used back in the old days (with languages lke Cobol) to open a file (or magnetic tape), read a record, process a record and repeat. Often with control breaks (a concept lost on many programmers today), writing new records to a new tape.
This is a very wrong approach in any RDBMS platform.
The very idea that you want to revisit a row that you already have processed says that there is something wrong with your approach. Says that you are using PL/SQL to process data row-by-row and not using SQL to process it as a data set.
And this method is an excellent way to kill performance.
I suggest that you carefully think of what your process needs to do and then determine how to do it correctly in a RDBMS like Oracle - where the resulting code will be performant and will be able to scale with increased data volumes.