On 4/8/06, Jan Wieck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I was allways under the impression > that Oracle's ROWNUM is a thing attached to a row in the final result > set, whatever (possibly random) order that happens to have. Now a) this > is something that IMHO belongs into the client or stored procedure code, > b) if I am right, the code below will break as soon as an ORDER BY is > added to the query and most importantly c) if a) cannot do the job, it > indicates that the database schema or business process definition lacks > some key/referential definition and is in need of a fix.
Yes, a rownum is assigned at fetch time. An example is the following PostgreSQL query: SELECT id FROM sometable ORDER BY id LIMIT 5; In Oracle-land is written as: SELECT id FROM (SELECT id FROM sometable ORDER BY id) WHERE rownum <= 5; > My humble guess is that c) is also the reason why the ANSI didn't find a > ROWNUM desirable. I believe this is a good assumption. -- Jonah H. Harris, Database Internals Architect EnterpriseDB Corporation 732.331.1324 ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 5: don't forget to increase your free space map settings
