It apparently wasn’t actually his last words, as is often incorrectly reported to be the case, but something that Oscar Wilde apparently most-likely did say on his deathbed and near the end of his life:
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/10/22/wallpaper/
There is a duel to the death between me and my wallpaper. One or the other of us has to go. It will be my wallpaper or me.
goes looking for the issue
Hmm. I would believe that there are efficiency gains from doing one large insert rather than many small — like, there are probably optimizations one can take advantage of in rebuilding indexes — and it’d be nice for database users to have a way to leverage that.
On the other hand, I can also believe that DBMSes might hold locks while running a query, and permitting unbounded (or very large) size and complexity queries might create problems for concurrent users, as a lock might be held for a long time.
EDIT: Hmm. Lock granularity probably isn’t the issue:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/758945/whats-the-fastest-way-to-do-a-bulk-insert-into-postgres
Any lock granularity issues would also apply to transactions.
Might be concerns about how the query-processing code scales.