ROWID

Having mentioned a couple of dangers associated with IOT Secondary Indexes, thought I might discuss a couple of their nicer attributes. In the previous post, we saw how 50-50 index block splits on the ALBUM_SALES_IOT IOT table caused rows to move to new leaf blocks, resulting in a degradation in the PCT_DIRECT_ACCESS value of the associated ALBUM_SALES_IOT_TOTAL_SALES_I secondary [...]

As discussed previously, an index entry within a Secondary Index on an Index Organized Table (IOT) basically consists of the indexed column(s) and the Logical Rowid, the PK column(s) and a “guess” to the physical block in the IOT containing the corresponding row. Let’s discuss this “guess” component in a bit more detail. When the Secondary [...]

Here is an odd little bug that was discussed a couple of weeks ago on the OTN forums.

It's about queries on join views by ROWID that fail with "ORA-01410: invalid ROWID" under certain circumstances. The bug can only be reproduced when using the 11.2 code base. In fact the same setup will cause an internal error in 11.1, but 10.2 will return correct results.

It's probably not a very common scenario but it is an interesting example of how features that work fine by themselves can cause problems when used together.

First of all (hopefully) some of you may ask: How is it possible to query from a join view by ROWID, since the view is based on multiple objects and hence doesn't have a simple one-to-one mapping to a ROWID of a single table?