C H A P T E R  6

Bulk SQL Operations

by Connor McDonald

This chapter is about the bulk SQL operations available in PL/SQL. Bulk operations in PL/SQL enable you to manipulate and process many rows at once, rather than one row at a time. In this chapter, you’ll learn about bulk fetching and bulk binding. Bulk fetching refers to the ability to retrieve a set of rows from the database into PL/SQL structures with a single call, rather than making a call to the database for each row to be retrieved. Bulk binding lets you perform the converse: to take those sets of rows stored in PL/SQL structures and save them to the database in an efficient manner.

You’ll see the tremendous performance benefits possible with bulk SQL operations. To achieve these benefits requires a little extra complexity in your code, especially in the area of error handling, but I’ll show you how to manage that complexity so that you will achieve performance benefits without compromising the manageability of your code.