DELETE with JOIN

I want to delete with a join condition. Google shows this is a common
problem, but the only solutions are either for MySQL or they don't
work in my situation because there are too many rows selected. I also
have to make this work on several databases, includeing, grrr, Oracle,
so non-standard MySQL "solutions" are doubly aggravating.

DELETE FROM a WHERE a.b_id = b.id AND b.second_id = ?

I have tried to do this before and always found a way, usually

DELETE FROM a WHERE a.b_id IN (SELECT id FROM b WHERE second_id = ?)

but I have too many rows, millions, in the IN crowd, ha ha, and it
barfs. EXISTS is no better. At least Oracle barfs, and I haven't got
to the others yet. I figured I would go with the worst offender
first, and let me tell you, it is offensive. Dang I wish it were
postgresql only!

I could write a Dumb Little Test Program (tm) to read in all those IN
ids and execute a zillion individual DELETE statements, but it would
be slow as puke and this little delete is going to come up quite often
now that I have a test program which needs to generate the junky data
and play with it for several days before deleting it and starting over
again.

--
... _._. ._ ._. . _._. ._. ___ .__ ._. . .__. ._ .. ._.
Felix Finch: scarecrow repairman & rocket surgeon / felix(at)crowfix(dot)com
GPG = E987 4493 C860 246C 3B1E 6477 7838 76E9 182E 8151 ITAR license #4933
I've found a solution to Fermat's Last Theorem but I see I've run out of room o