Tell us about bulk operations in PL/SQL — how do they differ from regular operations?

Bulk operations in PL/SQL allow performing mass operations on data collections with a single call, significantly increasing performance compared to processing data one element at a time.

Instead of a loop processing each record separately, bulk operations (such as BULK COLLECT and FORALL) enable:

• BULK COLLECT — quickly loading multiple rows from a cursor into a collection
• FORALL — executing DML operations (INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE) on a collection in one pass

This reduces the number of switches between SQL and PL/SQL, decreasing overhead and speeding up execution.