The DUAL table is a special one-row table present by default in all Oracle database installations. It is suitable for use in selecting a pseudocolumn such as SYSDATE or USER. The table has a single VARCHAR2(1) column called DUMMY that has a value of 'X'.
There may be a situation where we want to query something that is not from a table. For example, getting the current date or querying a simple arithmetic expression like 2+2.
In Oracle, clause FROM is not exceptional. If we don’t write the FROM clause in Oracle, we’ll get an error.
To print out the result of the calculation
Select 2*4 from dual
To print the server current date.
Select sysdate from dual