Question

I have a very large db that I am working with, and I need to know how to select a large set of id’s which doesn’t have any real pattern to them. This is segment of code I have so far:

longIdList = [1, 3, 5 ,8 ....................................]
for id in longIdList
    sql = "select * from Table where id = %s" %id
    result = cursor.execute(sql)
    print result.fetchone()

I was thinking, That there must be a quicker way of doing this… I mean my script needs to search through a db that has over 4 million id’s. Is there a way that I can use a select command to grab them all in one shot. could I use the where statement with a list of id’s? Thanks

Answer 1

You can use IN to look for multiple items simultaneously:

SELECT * FROM Table WHERE id IN (x, y, z, ...)

So maybe something like:

sql = "select * from Table where id in (%s)" % (', '.join(str(id) for id in longIdList))