What is the dual table in Oracle?

I've heard people referring to this table and was not sure what it was about.

It's a sort of dummy table with a single record used for selecting when you're not actually interested in the data, but instead want the results of some system function in a select statement:

e.g. select sysdate from dual;

See http://www.adp-gmbh.ch/ora/misc/dual.html

It is a dummy table with one element in it. It is useful because Oracle doesn't allow statements like

 SELECT 3+4

You can work around this restriction by writing

 SELECT 3+4 FROM DUAL

instead.

From Wikipedia

History

The DUAL table was created by Chuck Weiss of Oracle corporation to provide a table for joining in internal views:

I created the DUAL table as an underlying object in the Oracle Data Dictionary. It was never meant to be seen itself, but instead used inside a view that was expected to be queried. The idea was that you could do a JOIN to the DUAL table and create two rows in the result for every one row in your table. Then, by using GROUP BY, the resulting join could be summarized to show the amount of storage for the DATA extent and for the INDEX extent(s). The name, DUAL, seemed apt for the process of creating a pair of rows from just one. 1

It may not be obvious from the above, but the original DUAL table had two rows in it (hence its name). Nowadays it only has one row.

Optimization

DUAL was originally a table and the database engine would perform disk IO on the table when selecting from DUAL. This disk IO was usually logical IO (not involving physical disk access) as the disk blocks were usually already cached in memory. This resulted in a large amount of logical IO against the DUAL table.

Later versions of the Oracle database have been optimized and the database no longer performs physical or logical IO on the DUAL table even though the DUAL table still actually exists.