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ROWID Data Type

You can examine a row address of a relational table by querying the pseudocolumn ROWID. Values of this pseudocolumn are strings representing the address of each row. These strings have the data type ROWID.


Note:

Although you can create relational tables and clusters that contain actual columns having the ROWID data type. Oracle Database does not guarantee that the values of such columns are valid rowids

The extended ROWID data type stored in a user column includes the data in the restricted rowid plus a data object number. The data object number is an identification number assigned to every database segment. You can retrieve the data object number from the data dictionary views USER_OBJECTS, DBA_OBJECTS, and ALL_OBJECTS. Objects that share the same segment (clustered tables in the same cluster, for example) have the same object number.

Extended rowids are stored as base 64 values that can contain the characters A-Z, a-z, 0-9, and the plus sign (+) and forward slash (/). Extended rowids are not available directly. You can use a supplied package, DBMS_ROWID, to interpret extended rowid contents. The package functions extract and provide information that would be available directly from a restricted rowid as well as information specific to extended rowids.


See also:

"ROWID Pseudocolumn" in Oracle Database SQL Language Reference.