Urgent HELP required on forming the Matrix of data using PL/SQL

Question

Hi All,
I'm new to this thread and require your urgent help in this regard.
I've got a requirement for building a 5000 X 5000 matrix using PL/SQL. My original data tables have 5000 rows each and I need to do a correlation analysis using this data and need to store in a physical table and not in-memory. Is this feat achievable using mere PL/SQL? I understand that Oracle DB has a limitation of 1000 columns(but not sure) and hence I'd like to know whether there is any work-around for such scenarios. If not, what are the other alternative method(s) to achieve this feat? Do I need to use any 3rd party tools to get this done? An early reply from the experts is highly appreciated.
Thanking you all Gurus in advance.
Rgds
Sai

Answer 1

Welcome to OTN!
I'll get to your quesiton in a moment, but first some welcome information. Many OTN posters consider it impolite to mark threads as "urgent". We are volunteers and have jobs of our own to do without people we don't know making demands. You are brand new and deserve some patience but please understand this. It is very likely before I finish this post someone will complain about the word "urgent" in your subject.
On to more interesting things :)
You can do the matrix, but are out of luck with a 5000 x 5000 table because Oracle only allows 1000 columns per table. There are ways to work around this.
How do do the matrix depends on what you want to do. You can do this different ways. You can create a table beforehand and use PL/SQL or simple SQL to populate it, or use the CREATE TABLE AS syntax to create and populate it in one step if you can get the underlying SQL to work the way you want, something like
create table my_table as
  select a.*, b.*
    from table1 a, table2 bcan populate a matrix from 2 tables with an intentional cartesian join (the WHERE clause was left out intentionally, provided your data is already in the data base.
If not you can use a PL/SQL routine to populate the data.
There are a couple of ways to solve the 1000 column limit. The easiest way might be to have 5 collections of 1000 columns each. A more complicated but more elegant soltion would be to have nested collections, allowing 2 colliections that you can loop through - a collection of collections. Nested collections can be hard to work with. A third way would be to use nested tables in the database but I personally do not like them and the insert, update, and delete statements for nested tables are hard to use.
I'm not going to give a code example because I am not sure which solution is best for you. If you have further questions post them.