Basically, as tamilselvan said, this is a very bad idea. This means that your table is not even in First Normal Form. Not having a PK on a table is a wholly unacceptable design.

Having said that, the problem that I would see with your routine would be that the ROWID could have changed. If you did not lock the row when you SELECTed it, then other users were free to UPDATE or DELETE said row. Therefore, you must be able to handle the fact that the row may no longer exist, or may actually exist, but with a different row id.

However, you did say that it had a "Unique key which includes all the fields of the table ". Then why not use all the fields in the WHERE clause? This has the same issues with records moving or deleting, but allows you to bypass use of the row id. Using the ROWID, IMHO, is a very bad idea. I personally don't think Oracle should ever have exposed that column. Creating a sequenced PK on this table would really be your best move.


Just my .02,

- Chris