Re: JDBC and processing large numbers of rows

David,
Use cursors to page through really large result sets

Dave

On Tue, 2004-05-11 at 11:37, David Wall wrote:
> This is more towards JDBC than PG in particular, but since we support PG,
> Oracle and eventually other DBMS via JDBC, I thought I'd see if anybody has
> any good ideas on how do the following in a somewhat portable way via JDBC
> (by large, I'm talking about thousands to millions of rows -- significant
> amounts of data)
>
> 1) Often people need to "page through" large result set. Some DBs support
> the LIMIT,OFFSET construct of SELECT, and while not super efficient, at
> least it only returns the window of the result set that is of interest. How
> do most people handle such paging through of data? I've heard people cache
> the entire result set, but that's not practical because of the memory
> overhead and, with the web, not even knowing when to get rid of the
> resultset. Do people use work tables or other schemes to "pre-paginate" the
> results but store it in a temporary table?
>
>
> 2) How do people process many records in a large resultset? For example,
> scanning through a list of rows and then doing some processing based on
> those rows, and then perhaps updating the rows to indicate that they've been
> processed.
>
>
> 3) How do people use cursors in JDBC? Being able to FETCH seems like a nice
> way to handle question #2 above in a batch program, since only a subset of
> rows needs to be retrieved from the db at a time. Cursors probably don't
> work for question #1 above since keeping a transaction alive across page
> views is generally frowned upon and even hard to accomplish since it means
> locking up a connection to the db for each paging user.
>
>
> Any pointers would be appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
> David
>
>
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Dave Cramer
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