Sometimes we find ora-01410 as misleading. Couple of possible error cause scenarios are explained here... SQL> select * from dual where rowid='musings not allowed here'; select * from dual where rowid='musings not allowed here' *ERROR at line 1: ORA-01410: invalid ROWID I think , this error is probably much straighforward - you asked for some rowid which is actually invalid, by common sense, and Oracle repoted the same. But, we also sometimes see this error, even we don't reference to rowid psedo column - a typical select statement may very likely throw this error. I understood it due to Read Consistency. Even if it may sound strange, following explaination hopefully unveils the fact. Assume a session running a long running query that uses an index that gets rebuilt by another session. Indexes have some iteresting feature when it comes to rebuilding. While rebuilding, Oracle doesn't actually overwrite the inndex while it rebuilds, but it creates a fresh copy of index, and when new copy is ready to serve, it replaces the existing one. This approach improves the availability of the table quite effectively. Same is the reason why an index rebuild requires the the space atleast double the size of the index. Having said that, a long running query that started with using old copy of index, may later start using new copy while it still runs (because other index rebuild sessoin rebuilt/replaced the old copy). So, rowids fetched by the query at the begining (pointing to old index) are obsolete now as they are no longer valid. Hence the invalid rowid error. We can't expect the same read consistency that we get from transaction/DML operations. There are no invalid data or lost data as long as there is enough undo segment. Oracle reads though the undo segments for read consistent data. But in case of rebuild, it is DDL and it's lost forever, so we can't expect Oracle to do read consistency here as well. So, I think, read consistency with DDL is the responsibility of application rather than Oracle. Hope it helps! - Karteek