What is the maximum rows allowed in PLSQL array table type?

Question

Hi,
I have a procedure and it contains the cursor which will fetch more than 500 records. And i have 5 output parameters to store the values coming from the cursor. I don't want to store that into custom table. I want to save it one table type array or something like that. Now i want to know what is the maximum storage of array table type? If i store more than 500 data, how will be the performance? Then is there any other way to achieve this? And that should not decrease the preformace.Let me know your thoughts.
Thanks

Answer 1

It really depends on what you are planning to do with the records once you return them from your stored procedure, and what client is on the receiving end of the results.
One option would be to just return a ref cursor and let the client deal with retreiving the rows themselves, whether one by on or by a bulk collect. Another option would be to declare a table of records matching the result set and do a bulk collect into that table type in your procedure and return the table type to the caller. You could also declare a table type for each field in the resultset, bulk collect the records into thos types and return one for each field.
Personally, I would likely go with returning a ref cursor. Both of the collect the resultset in your procedure and then return collections to the caller methods require memory on the database server to hold the entire resultset and memeory on the client to hold the entire resultset. While 500 records is probably not going to be too bad on memory, if the result set grows, you will run into memory issues at some point.
John