Re: a basic question

Hi Paul,
dual is general purpose table for all information you need to retrieve from the database and is not stored in proper tables examples
select sysdate from dual;
select userenv('sessionid') from dual;
select sequence.nextval from dual;
The content of your dual table is correct. Please don't mess with it. Everywhere a select from dual expects to return one and exactly one row.

Hth,

--
Sybrand Bakker, Oracle DBA
paul cluiss <paul_cluiss_at_intervoice.com> wrote in message news:65147E123DB33F5E.42E3B155B2909B25.F596E455BFB0E46D_at_lp.airnews.net...
> Hello all,
>
> I have a basic Oracle question:
>
> What is 'dual'? I've done a bit if reading from general purpose (IE,
> non-Oracle specific) SQL books and they never mention the 'dual' table,
> but I see it cropping up again and again in computations, so please,
> enlighten me. What is dual? Mine currently has one field called
> 'dummy' and has a value of 'X'.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Paul Cluiss
> Dallas, Texas
>
Received on Mon Sep 20 1999 - 16:41:39 CDT