Section 3, Rule 17 of the 1997 Rules of Court  provides:

SEC. 3.  Dismissal due to fault of plaintiff. – If, for no justifiable cause, the plaintiff fails to appear on the date of the presentation of his evidence in chief on the complaint, or to prosecute his action for an unreasonable length of time, or to comply with these Rules or any order of the court, the complaint may be dismissed upon motion of the defendant or upon the court’s own motion, without prejudice to the right of the defendant to prosecute his counterclaim in the same or in a separate action.  This dismissal shall have the effect of an adjudication upon the merits, unless otherwise declared by the court. (Emphases supplied)

A judgment is revived only when the same cannot be enforced by motion, that is, after five years from the time it becomes final. A revived judgment can be enforced by motion within five years from its finality. After said five years, how may the revived judgment be enforced? Appellee contends that by that time ten years or more would have elapsed since the first judgment becomes final, so that an action to enforce said judgment would then be barred by the statute of limitations.

Appellee's theory relates the period of prescription to the date the original judgment became final. Such a stand is inconsistent with the accepted view that a judgment reviving a previous one is a new and different judgment. The inconsistency becomes clearer when we consider that the causes of action in the three cases are different. In the original case, the action was premised on the unpaid promissory note signed by Joaquin Bondoc in favor of the Philippine National Bank; in the second case, the Philippine National Bank's cause of action was the judgment rendered in Civil Case No. 8040; and in the present case, the basis is the judgment rendered in Civil Case No. 30663. Parenthetically, even the amounts involved are different.

The source of Section 6 aforecited is Section 447 of the Code of Civil Procedure which in turn was derived from the Code of Civil Procedure of California. The rule followed in California in this regard is that a proceeding by separate ordinary action to revive a judgment is a new action rather than a continuation of the old, and results in a new judgment constituting a new cause of action, upon which a new period of limitations begins to run.³

The judgment in Civil Case No. 30663, which provided the cause of action in the case at bar, was rendered on February 20, 1957 and became final in the same year. Pursuant to Article 1144(3) of the New Civil Code the action upon such judgment must be brought within ten years from 1957 or until 1967. The instant case instituted in the court a quo on June 7, 1962 is well within the prescriptive period.