Pattern to substitute for MERGE INTO Oracle syntax when not allowed

Question

I have an application that uses the Oracle MERGE INTO... DML statement to update table A to correspond with some of the changes in another table B (table A is a summary of selected parts of table B along with some other info). In a typical merge operation, 5-6 rows (out of 10's of thousands) might be inserted in table B and 2-3 rows updated.

It turns out that the application is to be deployed in an environment that has a security policy on the target tables. The MERGE INTO... statement can't be used with these tables (ORA-28132: Merge into syntax does not support security policies)

So we have to change the MERGE INTO... logic to use regular inserts and updates instead. Is this a problem anyone else has run into? Is there a best-practice pattern for converting the WHEN MATCHED/WHEN NOT MATCHED logic in the merge statement into INSERT and UPDATE statements? The merge is within a stored procedure, so it's fine for the solution to use PL/SQL in addition to the DML if that is required.

Rajesh Chamarthi · Accepted Answer · 2011-06-16T01:46:00.650

Another way to do this (other than Merge) would be using two sql statements one for insert and one for update. The "WHEN MATCHED" and "WHEN NOT MATCHED" can be handled using joins or "in" Clause.

If you decide to take the below approach, it is better to run the update first (sine it only runs for the matching records) and then insert the non-Matching records. The Data sets would be the same either way, it just updates less number of records with the order below.

Also, Similar to the Merge, this update statement updates the Name Column even if the names in Source and Target match. If you dont want that, add that condition to the where as well.

create table src_table(
   id number primary key,
   name varchar2(20) not null
);

create table tgt_table(
   id number primary key,
   name varchar2(20) not null
);

insert into src_table values (1, 'abc');
insert into src_table values (2, 'def');
insert into src_table values (3, 'ghi');

insert into tgt_table values (1, 'abc');
insert into tgt_table values (2,'xyz');

SQL> select * from Src_Table;

        ID NAME
---------- --------------------
         1 abc
         2 def
         3 ghi

SQL> select * from Tgt_Table;

        ID NAME
---------- --------------------
         2 xyz
         1 abc

Update tgt_Table tgt
   set Tgt.Name = 
      (select Src.Name
          from Src_Table Src
          where Src.id = Tgt.id
      );

2 rows updated. --Notice that ID 1 is updated even though value did not change

select * from Tgt_Table;

   ID NAME
----- --------------------
    2 def
    1 abc

insert into tgt_Table
select src.*
  from Src_Table src,
       tgt_Table tgt
  where src.id = tgt.id(+)
    and tgt.id is null;

1 row created.

SQL> select * from tgt_Table;

        ID NAME
---------- --------------------
         2 def
         1 abc
         3 ghi

commit;

There could be better ways to do this, but this seems simple and SQL-oriented. If the Data set is Large, then a PL/SQL solution won't be as performant.

The `insert` is not very efficient with an outer join. Better to use `not in (...)` or `not exists (...)`. — Martin Schapendonk, Jun 16 '11 at 06:51

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 15 '11 at 21:16

There are at least two options I can think of aside from digging into the security policy, which I don't know much about.

Process the records to merge row by row. Attempt to do the update, if it fails to update then insert, or vise versa, depending on whether you expect most records to need updating or inserting (ie optimize for the most common case that will reduce the number of SQL statements fired), eg:

begin
  for row in (select ... from source_table) loop
    update table_to_be_merged
    if sql%rowcount = 0 then -- no row matched, so need to insert
      insert ...
    end if;
  end loop;
end;

Another option may be to bulk collect the records you want to merge into an array, and then attempted to bulk insert them, catching all the primary key exceptions (I cannot recall the syntax for this right now, but you can get a bulk insert to place all the rows that fail to insert into another array and then process them).

Logically a merge statement has to check for the presence of each records behind the scenes anyway, and I think it is processed quite similarly to the code I posted above. However, merge will always be more efficient than coding it in PLSQL as it will be only 1 SQL call instead of many.

Pattern to substitute for MERGE INTO Oracle syntax when not allowed

2 Answers2