Maximum Size of Where Clause

[Nathan Ziarek]

I am not sure if "clause" is the correct terminology.

I am receiving a list of numbers from an external, non-mySQL source that I need to use in a query. The string will range from just a few numbers to perhaps a hundred thousand.

What I need to do is query the database for each one of these images to get some information back.

I tried looping through each one, but at 500 queries, the slowdown was noticeable. Not bad, but noticeable. My next guess was to turn the images into a long WHERE clause. It worked, and it worked pretty fast. But, as I said, there are only about 500 images at this point. What happens when I get to 50,000 OR's in my WHERE clause? Will it still work? Will it be fast? Is there a limit to the number or characters in a WHERE clause?


Any suggestions, or this not a bad route (sure feels icky :-)

Nate