ROWNUM

ROWNUM is a psuedocolumn to return the row number of the row in a table. The order will be based on how oracle selects a row from table.

rownum1

Examples with rownum

rownum2

rownum3

Note that rownum will be decided by Oracle itself ( Oracle will assign a number based on how it retrieves from storage/memory)

Order by

Order by is a sql clause which used to order a selected column

Example :-

orderby1

Order by and Rownum together

Why we should use rownum and Order by clause together ? Many experienced developers ( Mainly java developers ) think they can write rownum and order by in same where clause to get the top N query.

For example – To find lowest salary employee developers write like below

select * from emp where rownum = 1 order by salary asc ; —  wrong query

see the result

rownum_orderby_wrong.PNG

Result is wrong.  It should be salary 7500 ( Empno – 14 )

Why ? Oracle applies the ROWNUM first and then applies the order by clause.

See the correct query below

rownum_orderby_correct

So always apply the order by and in next level apply the rownum.

To find a lowest salary employee :-

select * from emp where rownum = 1 order by salary asc ; —  wrong query

select * from (select * from emp order by salary asc) where rownum = 1 — correct query 

Few more tips about rownum

  1. Do not write ROWNUM = 0 ( There is no record having ROWNUM = 0)
  2. Do not write ROWNUM <= 1 instead write ROWNUM = 1
  3. In general Oracle assigns ROWNUM while retrieving the records, it is not based on Primary key column
  4. Do not write ROWNUM > 1, which will no yield any results
  5. ROWNUM and ROW_NUMBER() is not same.

Please comment.