Oracle 9i bad SELECT result?

Question

Hi people,
Here is a doozy for everyone....
Can someone please explain the following behaviour to me?
I was trying to setup some test data for a unit test ( I wanted to select a random row from a data table ). Okedokey, off I went and constructed the data table with full precision timestamps for every hour in the current year. Now to construct some random time ranges, I want to select the results of a random row in that table. Ah ha! 9i's analytics to the rescue.
DOH! It didn't work... without the counter-intuitive rownum restriction on dual it randomly returns no rows, multiple rows and more importanly rows that do NOT fulfil the criteria of b.n_row being equal to a.n_random_row. To get it to work I need to put the patently ridiculous ROWNUM = 1 against the DUAL inline view .... Any ideas what is going wrong?
=============== SETUP =================
create table tmp_timeline ( t_timestamp timestamp(9) with time zone );
insert into tmp_timeline
select to_timestamp_tz( '01-JAN-2002 00:00:00 +10:00', 'DD-MON-YYYY HH24:MI:SS TZH:TZM' ) + rownum / 24 t_timestamp
from all_objects, all_objects
where rownum < 8760;
=============== SETUP ====================
=============== ERRONEOUS? SQL =============
select to_char( t_timestamp ) "timestamp",
n_row,
n_random_row
from
-- ( 8759 is the count(*) of rows in table tmp_timeline )
select trunc( dbms_random.value( 1, 8759 ) ) n_random_row
from dual
-- where rownum = 1
-- ???? Uncommenting the nonsense line above this one fixes!
) a
inner join
select tt.t_timestamp,
row_number() over ( order by tt.t_timestamp ) n_row
from tmp_timeline tt
) b
on b.n_row = a.n_random_row
=============== ERRONEOUS? SQL =============
I was under the impression that DUAL is designed to return exactly ONE row. Is my understanding of INNER JOIN and DUAL somehow cockeyed or is there something weird going on with the function execution?
Please shed some light on this if you have any ideas!
Thanks,
Lachlan Pitts
[select * from v$version]
Oracle9i Enterprise Edition Release 9.0.1.1.1 - Production
PL/SQL Release 9.0.1.1.1 - Production
CORE     9.0.1.1.1     Production
TNS for 32-bit Windows: Version 9.0.1.1.0 - Production
NLSRTL Version 9.0.1.1.1 - Production

Answer 1

Partition Outer Joins is the feature of Oracle 10g not 9i
i think u r confuse with Analytical Functions Partition by thing.... Analytical functions are available since 8i
Syntax for 10g Partition by
SELECT ...
FROM ...
PARTITION BY (expr [,expr ]... )
RIGHT OUTER JOIN table_referenceBaig
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