I have some configuration information in some tables that need to get dumped to some flat files.
What's the best way to detect that the tables have changed? I don't have control of some of these tables, so I would prefer to avoid a trigger if possible.
You could try the USER_TAB_MODIFICATIONS view, which is populated for tables with MONITORING enabled. It may no be 100% up-to-date, but you can run a stored procedure to flush the most recent data.
And then there is ORA_ROWSCN, which is a conservative upper bound system change number for when the row was last updated.
select scn_to_timestamp(max(ora_rowscn)) from table_name