Looking for the Oracle equivalent to MS SQL Server timestamp field

I'm looking for the Oracle data type and possibly method to shadow the MS SQL Server timestamp data type.

From SQL Server Online help a timestamp is defined as: timestamp is a data type that exposes automatically generated binary numbers, which are guaranteed to be unique within a database. timestamp is used typically as a mechanism for version-stamping table rows. The storage size is 8 bytes.

I'm not necessarily concernd that the datatype stays binary but the funcationality is what I'm after. In particular is the notion of ensuring that I can tell if a record has been updated since the data was pulled that I'm now working with and possibly updating back to the db system.

Thanks in advance.
Arch Received on Tue Feb 18 2003 - 20:36:24 CET