rowtype

I had an AskTOM question come in with an issue trying to PL/SQL on an Active Data Guard (ADG) database (which of course is running in read-only mode). The PL/SQL block seems innocuous; it does not DML and yet refuses to run:

SQL> DECLARE
  2    tst_row  dual%ROWTYPE;
  3  BEGIN
  4    null;
  5  END;
  6  /
DECLARE
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-16000: database or pluggable database open for read-only access

I did a trace on the code, and made an interesting discovery, and hence the cause of the error. When we reference a ROWTYPE definition, we need a mechanism to refer to and compile against that definition of that type. Hence we temporarily “create” a type definition to handle that. Tracing the above anonymous block, you’ll see the following entries in the trace file