I have a transaction table of 1 million rows. The table has a field name "Code" to keep customer's ID. There are about 10,000 different customer code.

I have an GUI interface allow user to render a report from transaction table. User may select arbitrary number of customers for rendering.

I use IN operator first and it works for few customers:

SELECT * FROM TRANS_TABLE WHERE CODE IN ('...', '...', '...')

I quickly run into problem if I select few thousand customers. There is limitation using IN operator.

An alternate way is create a temporary table with only one field of CODE, and inject selected customer codes into the temporary table using INSERT statement. I may then using

SELECT A.* FROM TRANS_TABLE A INNER JOIN TEMP B ON (A.CODE=B.CODE)

This works nice for huge selection. However, there is performance overhead for temporary table creation, INSERT injection and dropping of temporary table.

Do you aware of better solution to handle this situation?