Can you have a calculated column in a table not a view?

Question

We have a table which contains a series of rows
Key   Effective Date   Value
1       10/Feb/2006     123
1       23/Oct/2006      456
...We have a requirement to store an indicator that tells us which row is the most current and what the end date of the preceding row was so that we get something along the lines of:
Key   Effective Date   Value   Status         End Date
1       10/Feb/2006     123      HISTORY    22/Oct/2006
1       23/Oct/2006      456     CURRENT   NULL
...I can produce this result quite easily using the analytic function LEAD. My question is, is the answer to this problem to create a view over the table that includes the analytic function or is it possible to define a calculated column in a table that would populate/maintain this vale as part of a table definition?
And as I finish writing this I feel I've answered my own question but hey, there's no harm in asking how others have handled this kind of situation.
Cheers
Richard

Answer 1

My bias would be to create a view that did the calculation.
In theory, you could add those additional columns to a table and maintain the data via a set of triggers, but that would be substantially more complicated than the alternatives for little or no benefit.
A third option would be a materialized view. That might be easier to deal with if you want to have different indexing strategies for current and historical records or if the historical data is queried often enough and updated infrequently enough that it ends up being cheaper to do the calculation once during the update rather than every time the query is run.
A fourth option would be to use stored procedures to maintain the data and have that stored procedure expire the current row and add the new row.
Finally, you might consider version-enabling your table using Workspace Manager rather than writing your own code since Oracle has already written all this code for you.
Justin