Oraclue
Oracle internals, debugging and undocumented features
Querying multiple rows from dual
February 6, 2012
Posted by on By Granville Bonyata
Sometimes it’s useful to have a query that always returns a certain number of rows, such as a report that returns one row for every day of the month. Using DUAL and CONNECT BY allows you to return as many rows as needed. For instance, this query returns one row for every day of the month:
SELECT TO_DATE(level||’-‘||TO_CHAR(SYSDATE,’MON-YYYY’)) each_day from dual connect by level <= TO_CHAR(LAST_DAY(SYSDATE),’DD’) ORDER BY 1;
SQL> /
EACH_DAY ——— 01-JAN-12 02-JAN-12 03-JAN-12 04-JAN-12 05-JAN-12 06-JAN-12 07-JAN-12 08-JAN-12 09-JAN-12 10-JAN-12 11-JAN-12 12-JAN-12 13-JAN-12 14-JAN-12 15-JAN-12 16-JAN-12 17-JAN-12 18-JAN-12 19-JAN-12 20-JAN-12 21-JAN-12 22-JAN-12 23-JAN-12 24-JAN-12 25-JAN-12 26-JAN-12 27-JAN-12 28-JAN-12 29-JAN-12 30-JAN-12 31-JAN-12
31 rows selected.