Faster way to Insert, via script, in Oracle?
Problem
Parsing time may increase exponentially with certain types of statements, especially INSERT ALL
. For example:
--Clear any cached statements, so we can consistently reproduce the problem.
alter system flush shared_pool;
alter session set sql_trace = true;
--100 rows
INSERT ALL
INTO FileIds(Id,FileTypeGroupId) VALUES(1, 1)
...
repeat 100 times
...
select * from dual;
--500 rows
INSERT ALL
INTO FileIds(Id,FileTypeGroupId) VALUES(1, 1)
...
repeat 500 times
...
select * from dual;
alter session set sql_trace = false;
Run the trace file through tkprof, and you can see the Parse time increases dramatically for a large number of rows. For example:
100 rows:
call count cpu elapsed disk query current rows
------- ------ -------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ----------
Parse 1 0.06 0.05 0 1 0 0
Execute 1 0.00 0.00 0 100 303 100
Fetch 0 0.00 0.00 0 0 0 0
------- ------ -------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ----------
total 2 0.06 0.05 0 101 303 100
500 rows:
call count cpu elapsed disk query current rows
------- ------ -------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ----------
Parse 1 14.72 14.55 0 0 0 0
Execute 1 0.01 0.02 0 502 1518 500
Fetch 0 0.00 0.00 0 0 0 0
------- ------ -------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ----------
total 2 14.74 14.58 0 502 1518 500
Solutions
- Break your large statement into several smaller statements. It's difficult to find the optimal size. On some versions of Oracle there's a magic number of rows that will cause the problem. I usually go for about 100 rows - enough to get most of the benefits of grouping statements, but low enough to avoid the parsing bug. OR...
- Try the
insert into ... select ... from dual union all ...
method instead. It usually runs much faster, although it's parsing performance may also degrade significantly with size. - Upgrade Oracle. Parsing performance has improved in newer versions. I can no longer reproduce this issue in version 12.2.
Warning
Don't learn the wrong lesson from this. If you're worried about SQL performance, 99% of the time you're better off grouping similar things together instead of splitting them apart. You're doing things the right way, you just ran into a weird bug. (I searched My Oracle Support but couldn't find an official bug for this.)