What is the dual table in Oracle?

oracle dual-table
Brian G picture Brian G · Sep 16, 2008 · Viewed 228.5k times · Source

I've heard people referring to this table and was not sure what it was about.

Answer

Sean McMains picture Sean McMains · Sep 16, 2008

It's a sort of dummy table with a single record used for selecting when you're not actually interested in the data, but instead want the results of some system function in a select statement:

e.g. select sysdate from dual;

See http://www.adp-gmbh.ch/ora/misc/dual.html

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