Re: Changing ROWID

> We recently had a small controversy around the office about when a ROWID
> will change for a given row. One camp held forth that ROWIDs were
> unreliable, and could possibly change even with a simple update. The
> other camp, pointing to an Oracle DBA manual, indicated that a ROWID
> remains constant "over the lifetime of the row". The second group
> believed that the "lifetime of a row" meant the time from when the row was
> created by an insert, until it was destroyed via a delete.
>
> Which is right?

The rowid is created during the insert of the row. From then on it NEVER changes (except during export/import, because that creates a NEW row). Only when the row is deleted, the rowid becomes available again to be assigned eventually to another row.

I don't understand why they can be a controversy on this point. This is clearly explained in the 'Oracle7 Server Concepts' manual, p. 6-9 and 6-10.

Mark Received on Tue Jan 10 1995 - 16:34:15 CET