Thank you to Daniel, Tao, Ghassan and Mark for your feedback. I wasn't clear in my original post but the data in question does goes back a few years so, although I gave the suggestions due diligence, in the end, it looks like Daniel is correct and that it's not possible. I've let the user know that it cannot be done and they understand. Thanks again for your input. Regards, Chris Langston -----Original Message----- From: Daniel Fink Sent: Wednesday, June 18, 2008 10:52 AM To: Langston, Chris Cc: oracle-l Subject: Re: Determine Record Creation Date Without Audit Turned On Short answer - not from the data dictionary. Long answer - without specific auditing or timestamps as part of the row, you cannot query the database to locate these records. However, you might be able to use logminer to locate the insert statements IF the redo log information is still available. I have not heard much about log miner in the last few years, so I'm not sure what is available with 10g. Are there any transaction logs from the application that would be of help? -- Daniel Fink Oracle Performance, Diagnosis, Data Recovery and Training OptimalDBA http://www.optimaldba.com Oracle Blog http://optimaldba.blogspot.com Lost Data? http://www.ora600.nl/introduction.htm -----Original Message----- From: Tao Wang Sent: Wednesday, June 18, 2008 11:34 AM To: Langston, Chris; oracle-l Subject: RE: Determine Record Creation Date Without Audit Turned On You can try the pseudo column ora_rowscn and function scn_to_timestamp(ora_rowscn). But the function scn_to_timestamp seems to work for rows updated relatively recently. From: Ghassan Salem Sent: Wednesday, June 18, 2008 11:48 AM To: Langston, Chris Subject: Re: Determine Record Creation Date Without Audit Turned On Maybe using the flashback query can get you there, if your undo allows -----Original Message----- From: Mark W. Farnham Sent: Wednesday, June 18, 2008 2:02 PM To: Langston, Chris; 'oracle-l' Subject: RE: Determine Record Creation Date Without Audit Turned On Dan, Patrick, and Tao have made useful suggestions. If none of those work out for you and you are within range of the time in question, you could do a set of flashback queries into a table containing just the table in questions's PK (not as the PK) and current query's as of time. Then if a given PK (original table) first appears in the time window to be deleted you're set. You might start with a broad grain of time, then use a very fine grain for just the candidates. The actual data would determine how fine a grain you would need to absolutely identify a row as being created within some window of time. Good luck! mwf Langston, Chris wrote: > All, > > We have a user that needs to do cleanup on a table in a 10.2 instance > and wants to remove rows in a table based on when the record was created > but there is no creation date as part of the record entry. Without > having auditing turned on, is there a way to do determine this from the > data dictionary tables and, if so, which ones. I'm a rather new DBA and > not well versed in Oracle's data dictionary tables. All of my searching > for keeps directing me to information about auditing. > > The primary DBA for the application is on vacation for the rest of the > month and I don't know that much about the application. > > Any direction or source of documentation that would explain this will be > much appreciated. > > Chris Langston > > -- > //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l > > > -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l