>>I have a follow up question, please. If one of the columns I want to "copy" to the target table has to be parsed, how would I do it? For example. The source table has field USER_NAME and the entry in this field is Last Name, First name. E.g. "Smith, John", "Nosonovsky, Naomi", and so on. I want to parse this field into the two fields of the Target table, FNAME and LNAME. Does SQL have SUBSTR() for that?
>
>Personally I strongly advise to do such things as discrete work flow steps - performance most of the times is not a limiting factor, getting result correct or clear idea what went wrong cuts down dev time. Getting everything into 1 long SQL statement sometimes is beneficial in recurring/app-used statements, but for admin tasks I think it is an anti-pattern.
>
>BTW: The hint on Merge(/Upsert) above instead of simple insert even on blank tables is spot on ;-)
I will definitely look for a simple tutorial on the Merge command. It is just that my to-learn list is getting longer and the desire to learn is weaker :). I should qualify that I mean to learn "technical" things. Learning French is more fun :).
"The creative process is nothing but a series of crises." Isaac Bashevis Singer
"My experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don't know anything at all." Oscar Wilde
"If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too." W.Somerset Maugham
