A recent question on the OTN Database Forum asked:
I need to check if at least one record present in table before processing rest of the statements in my PL/SQL procedure. Is there an efficient way to achieve that considering that the table is having huge number of records like 10K.
I don’t think many readers of the forum would consider 10K to be a huge number of records; nevertheless it is a question that could reasonably be asked, and should prompt a little discssion.
First question to ask, of course is: how often do you do this and how important is it to be as efficient as possible. We don’t want to waste a couple of days of coding and testing to save five seconds every 24 hours. Some context is needed before charging into high-tech geek solution mode.