Abstract: Provided herein are techniques that may be used to dramatically increase parallism for distributed DML operations. The work of distributed DML operations are distributed in a way that avoids self-dead locks, by ensuring that, for a given data block, no more than one slave is assigned to modify a row that is wholly contained by the data block or whose head row piece is contained by the data block. Assigning slaves in this way not only allows more slaves to be assigned to modify a partition, but allows for greater flexibility in load balancing.

Abstract: The present invention provides the ability to alternatively update or insert a row into a table. This functionality is accomplished by merging a source table with a destination table such that the rows in the combined table are classified as an update row or an insert row. An identifier is inserted into each row to indicate its class. Examination of the identifier allows the row to be correctly inserted into the destination table or correctly updated in the destination table.