Each element of %Data would be a different transaction anyways.

"Would be"? What do you mean? The way I wrote it, it's in one transaction as it should be.

Unless, of course, you plan on having a 2-million+ insert transaction. That will strain any rollback segment.

*blink* I wouldn't think for a nanosecond to not put them in one transaction. 2 million chances for something to go wrong - better protect myself against it. And since no futher information is available, I'm not going to assume that a partially modified table is acceptable. Besides, it's not only failure you want to protect yourself against - other processes should see a consistent table, and not one where half the rows are modified, and the other half aren't.

And, I can think of a specific case where I know I don't need transactions - a database that is loaded once and will never be written to. In that case, I don't want the overhead of a transaction on my SELECT statements.

Quite a specific case, and not at all applicable to the OP's problem where the database is being modified.

Abigail