I have an application that uses the Oracle MERGE INTO... DML statement to update table A to correspond with some of the changes in another table B (table A is a summary of selected parts of table B along with some other info). In a typical merge operation, 5-6 rows (out of 10's of thousands) might be inserted in table B and 2-3 rows updated.

It turns out that the application is to be deployed in an environment that has a security policy on the target tables. The MERGE INTO... statement can't be used with these tables (ORA-28132: Merge into syntax does not support security policies)

So we have to change the MERGE INTO... logic to use regular inserts and updates instead. Is this a problem anyone else has run into? Is there a best-practice pattern for converting the WHEN MATCHED/WHEN NOT MATCHED logic in the merge statement into INSERT and UPDATE statements? The merge is within a stored procedure, so it's fine for the solution to use PL/SQL in addition to the DML if that is required.