GROUP BY & implicit sorts

This is just an academic question.

Recently I read somewhere that Oracle does not guarantee that a GROUP BY will always sort the result set (as if you did an ORDER BY).

Now I always assumed that this was the case (probably just because in my experience this always seemed to happen).

Is Oracle just covering itself here? Along the lines of "we never actually promised that GROUP BY will do a sort, so if we find a better way of grouping without sorting, don't blame us".

Has anyone ever had experience of a GROUP BY that didn't sort as expected?

I've left code with a GROUP BY but no ORDER BY in applications the length and breadth of England - hope my name isn't at the top ;-)

CE Received on Wed Jul 24 2002 - 03:19:04 CDT