ROWNUM IN ORACLE

Question

I want to retrive record at 4th position in ORACLE 9i. Can I compare ROWNUM=4 in the WHERE clause??

Answer 1

No, ROWNUM is assigned after the WHERE clause is evaluated, so it cannot "skip" rownum one to three.

Furthermore, it is assigned BEFORE sorting.

This is the most annoying "feature" of Oracle. They really need to implement LIMIT/OFFSET.

You need to do something like

  select * from (
      select a.*, rownum rn from (
         select the_data from the_table order by the_order 
      ) a where rownum < 5
  ) where rn = 4