How to find out when an Oracle table was updated the last time

Question

Can I find out when the last INSERT, UPDATE or DELETE statement was performed on a table in an Oracle database and if so, how?

A little background: The Oracle version is 10g. I have a batch application that runs regularly, reads data from a single Oracle table and writes it into a file. I would like to skip this if the data hasn't changed since the last time the job ran.

The application is written in C++ and communicates with Oracle via OCI. It logs into Oracle with a "normal" user, so I can't use any special admin stuff.

Edit: Okay, "Special Admin Stuff" wasn't exactly a good description. What I mean is: I can't do anything besides SELECTing from tables and calling stored procedures. Changing anything about the database itself (like adding triggers), is sadly not an option if want to get it done before 2010.

Answer 1

I'm really late to this party but here's how I did it:

SELECT SCN_TO_TIMESTAMP(MAX(ora_rowscn)) from myTable;

It's close enough for my purposes.