Why no entry in V$TRANSACTION?

I am running a large update and then querying the v$transaction while the update is going on. But the V$transaction table has no entries. where do I get the transaction information from?

I am running Oracle SE Ver 8.1.6 on RedHat Linux.

If there is no entry in V$TRANSACTION, that means no transaction takes place at the time of your query executed.
V$TRANSACTION has info only when active transactions are running.

Hi

This query will return results if there are transactions in your session:
select t.*,s.*
from v$transaction t, v$session s
where t.addr=s.taddr
and audsid= (select userenv('sessionid') from dual)

if you get no result after this query, then you are not running any transactions at the moment the statment was issued.