merge into an empty table

Hello:

My application team is backfilling 150M rows of data from a staging table into an empty fact table. Under normal condition the fact table will be populated with the merge from the staging table. This is the first time load though and there will
be no updates - only inserts. For that reason I think that it should not be done via a merge, but rather via a straight insert nologging. I believe it will be much faster and more efficient that a merge (which does an outer join). Am I correct?

thank you

Gene Gurevich

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