Re: Changing ROWID

>Subject: Changing ROWID
>From: danielkm_at_aol.com (Daniel K M)
>Date: 4 Jan 1995 15:04:13 -0500
>Message-ID: <3eeuvt$8cg_at_newsbf02.news.aol.com>
 

>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?
 

>Why I need to know (for the curious):
>I need to know how to properly handle a "row not found" condition within
>one of my programs. Should I inform the user that the row has been
>deleted, or should I try to determine if it still exists, but has been
>modified in some way?

ROWID presists for the life of the row (insert --> delete).

BUT - ROWID's all change if you do an export/import.

In general it is not good practice to depend upon ROWID's staying the same since these are internal structures and Oracle could choose to change to way they work at any time.

Hope this helps

Dave Roth Received on Thu Jan 05 1995 - 02:29:08 CET