Generate A Fixed Number Of Records

Generating a fixed number of records is very handy sometimes. It can be used to create a cartesian product with an other table if those records must get multiplied. Or just to generate test data.

Until I found this neat solution, I used to UNION-ALL selects from dual to multiply records and selects from large data dictionary tables to generate test data...

Here is the nice way:

select 'whatever I want '||level
from   dual
connect by level <= 5
/