A pseudocolumn behaves like a table column, but is not actually stored in the table. You can select from pseudocolumns, but you cannot insert, update, or delete their values. A pseudocolumn is also similar to a function without arguments (refer to Functions). However, functions without arguments typically return the same value for every row in the result set, whereas pseudocolumns typically return a different value for each row.

This chapter contains the following sections:

• Hierarchical Query Pseudocolumns

• Sequence Pseudocolumns

• Version Query Pseudocolumns

• COLUMN_VALUE Pseudocolumn

• OBJECT_ID Pseudocolumn

• OBJECT_VALUE Pseudocolumn

• ORA_ROWSCN Pseudocolumn

• ROWID Pseudocolumn

• ROWNUM Pseudocolumn

• XMLDATA Pseudocolumn