Oracle Database Discussions

Hi all,

We're working to try to eventually update some rows on a table that an application has threads processing.
We're trying to basically update the value of one field it uses to 'mark' which is owned by that process.

while doing this, we were trying to just reset this field on some rows above where it is working. We tried using rownum.

This didn't work, so in trying to troubleshoot...we tried just a basic select to see if it would return any values to make sure rownum would work (dunno why it wouldn't).

If I try the following I get weird results

select count (*) from table1.

Returns like 13000 rows for a count.

I do this

select count (*) from table1 where rownum > 1

I get no rows.

The table has 13000 rows in it....

Now, if I do something like a select col1 from table1 where rownum < 10,
I get 9 rows...

I'm puzzled by this...

This originally came up with trying to update like I said, and was trying to do something like:

update table1 set field1 = 'value' where rownum between 1000 and 3000;

No rows updated.

I've not played with rownum in awhile, can someone give me some insight on what is going on here, or some links to info?

Thanks in advance,

cayenne