PL/SQL Looping a table and copying some values to another one...

Question

hi all!!!
i'm totally new to pl/sql, and i need to create an interaction to do the following..
my scenario is:
i have a table called "references" that contains 2 columns (new_id, old_id).
then i have another table called "ref" which also contains 2 columns (old_id, other_id).
ok the point is this:
in the table references i have stored the references between 2 products (the old one and the new one) by storing their ids.
now what i have to do by knowing this, is to insert in the table "ref" a new entry for every old_id that is already stored there, but changing it with the new_id that i can get from the other table (references).
let's see an example:
table references:
new_id - old_id
11 - 3
12 - 7
13 - 5
table ref:
old_id - other_id
3 - tu7r
7 - asduih
7 - anotherone
7 - 44444
5 - 6754f
so the result that i want is that the new ids (11,12,13) has to be copied to the table "ref" with the same "other_id" as their correspondants in "references" table.. the result would be:
table ref:
old_id - other_id
3 - tu7r
7 - asduih
7 - anotherone
7 - 44444
5 - 6754f
11 - tu7r
12 - asduih
12 - anotherone
12 - 44444
13 - 6754f
i don't know how to build up a loop or something to reach this aim!!
thanks for your time guys!!!
Edited by: ElMazzaX on Nov 17, 2011 3:15 PM

Answer 1

You do not need pl/sql to do this.
If I understand your datamodel correctly, this join will get you those records you need to insert:
select
references.new_id, ref.other_id
from references
join ref
   on ref.old_id = references.old_id;Try that select - it it works, then you can simply do:
insert into ref (old_id, other_id)
select
references.new_id, ref.other_id
from references
join ref
   on ref.old_id = references.old_id;SQL is quite enough - no PL/SQL loop necessary ;-)