The ROWNUM Pseudo-Column v13

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ROWNUM is a pseudo-column that is assigned an incremental, unique integer value for each row based on the order the rows were retrieved from a query. Therefore, the first row retrieved will have ROWNUM of 1; the second row will have ROWNUM of 2 and so on.

This feature can be used to limit the number of rows retrieved by a query. This is demonstrated in the following example:

SELECT empno, ename, job FROM emp WHERE ROWNUM < 5;

 empno | ename |   job
-------+-------+----------
 7369  | SMITH | CLERK
 7499  | ALLEN | SALESMAN
 7521  | WARD  | SALESMAN
 7566  | JONES | MANAGER
(4 rows)

The ROWNUM value is assigned to each row before any sorting of the result set takes place. Thus, the result set is returned in the order given by the ORDER BY clause, but the ROWNUM values may not necessarily be in ascending order as shown in the following example:

SELECT ROWNUM, empno, ename, job FROM emp WHERE ROWNUM < 5 ORDER BY ename;

 rownum | empno | ename |   job
--------+-------+-------+----------
      2 |  7499 | ALLEN | SALESMAN
      4 |  7566 | JONES | MANAGER
      1 |  7369 | SMITH | CLERK
      3 |  7521 | WARD  | SALESMAN
(4 rows)

The following example shows how a sequence number can be added to every row in the jobhist table. First a new column named, seqno, is added to the table and then seqno is set to ROWNUM in the UPDATE command.

ALTER TABLE jobhist ADD seqno NUMBER(3);
UPDATE jobhist SET seqno = ROWNUM;

The following SELECT command shows the new seqno values.

SELECT seqno, empno, TO_CHAR(startdate,'DD-MON-YY') AS start, job FROM
jobhist;

seqno  | empno |   start   |    job
-------+-------+-----------+-----------
     1 |  7369 | 17-DEC-80 | CLERK
     2 |  7499 | 20-FEB-81 | SALESMAN
     3 |  7521 | 22-FEB-81 | SALESMAN
     4 |  7566 | 02-APR-81 | MANAGER
     5 |  7654 | 28-SEP-81 | SALESMAN
     6 |  7698 | 01-MAY-81 | MANAGER
     7 |  7782 | 09-JUN-81 | MANAGER
     8 |  7788 | 19-APR-87 | CLERK
     9 |  7788 | 13-APR-88 | CLERK
    10 |  7788 | 05-MAY-90 | ANALYST
    11 |  7839 | 17-NOV-81 | PRESIDENT
    12 |  7844 | 08-SEP-81 | SALESMAN
    13 |  7876 | 23-MAY-87 | CLERK
    14 |  7900 | 03-DEC-81 | CLERK
    15 |  7900 | 15-JAN-83 | CLERK
    16 |  7902 | 03-DEC-81 | ANALYST
    17 |  7934 | 23-JAN-82 | CLERK
(17 rows)
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