SQL Query to return N rows from dual

Question

I want to write a SQL query which accepts a bind variable (say :NUM) and its output consists of one column & :NUM number of rows, each row having its row number. i.e. if we

Answer 1

I'm marking this community wiki since it doesn't actually answer your requirement for no tables, but one of the first things we do when installing a database is to create a set of tables for this sort of purpose.

• A table containing a large number of integers (e.g., -99999 through 99999).
• A table containing every date from 10 years in the past to 10 years in the future (which is continuously added to each month and trimmed occasionally).
• A table containing each hour of the day.

By doing this, we greatly reduce the complexity, and increase the speed, of a large number of our queries at the cost of (minimal and cheap) disk space.

You should give some serious thought to that. Aside from maintaining the date table, there's not a lot of upkeep needed.