I am using hibernate, using a view like a read only table and I need a primary key each time a select is issued. So in Oracle terms this might work, though I am skeptical that Hibernate is going to return a cached result. create view myview as select rownum, t1.field, t2.field from tableOne t1, tableTwo t2 where t1.key = t2.fkey select * from myview But what I really need is select makemeauniquekey, t1.field, t2.field ... Maybe there is no way I think... incrementing a sequence per select is untenable.