Re: changing multiple pk's in one update

On 2009-04-13, Stuart McGraw <smcg2297@frii.com> wrote:
> Jasen Betts wrote:

>> I see no reason to keep the index (and its associated UNIQUE
>> constraint) during the update, AFAICT all it does is slow the process
>> down.
>
> Thanks for the suggestion.
>
> Unfortunately I am doing this key renumbering in
> an interactive gui app and as there are several million 
> rows involved, rebuilding indexes take too long.

the update takes a long time too if it's updating all the rows.
and updating the index piecewise at the same time.
with the index extant I get from 20 (if the start and end ranges don't overlap) and 28s (with ,
to 28 seconds (maximum overlap) for a table with 1000000 (short) rows

it takes 18 seconds if I first drop the index, then update, then 
restore the index.

so, about the same amount of time or slightly faster by dropping the
index.

if wrap them in a transaction it takes 30s each way

> I have continued searching for other ways to do this
> but most of my google results are floating in a sea
> of "update if insert fails, like mysql" results so 
> I still have a little hope it is possible.
> I thought I remember seeing, a year or two ago, an 
> update statement with an ordered subquery that avoided 
> duplicate key errors but I am probably misrembering.

maybe you can do it using a cursor? I've not looked at them yet.