Quote Originally Posted by cjard
can you not just sort by ROWID to get the natural order that rows were inserted into the table? is it valid?
Of course not! ROWID has got nothing to do with what you call "natural order that rows were inserted into the table". There's no such thing in the Oracle database as built-in indicator of the inserted rows ordering. ROWID merely represents *the possition* of a particular row on the disk storage, it has no information about the time the row was inserted. And by comparing ROWIDs of two rows, you can not say which one was inserted befor the other one.

So, in short: ROWID can not be used for ordering rows in the way that original poster needs to.