While looping over results with a cursor or so within a SQL Snowflake Scripting, how can I return a table created in memory?
I could create a temp table and insert into to return the results at the end, but that's too slow.
(from a now deleted comment on Snowflake Scripting in SQL - how to iterate over the results of a SHOW command?)
A solution to create a table in memory is to create an array and then return the result of select * from(flatten(array):
declare
tmp_array ARRAY default ARRAY_CONSTRUCT();
rs_output RESULTSET;
begin
for i in 1 to 20 do
tmp_array := array_append(:tmp_array, OBJECT_CONSTRUCT('c1', 'a', 'c2', i));
end for;
rs_output := (select value:c1, value:c2 from table(flatten(:tmp_array)));
return table(rs_output);
end;
On my initial tests the performance is a little worse than linear, but much better than using a temp table.
(h/t Darren Gardner)