ROWID always increase for insert-only table?

Hello all,

  We had a complaint today from financial dept. about some long-made reports not being orderded correctly by date as usual. By further inspection, I realized that instead being ordered by the DATE column of the table, the select was being ordered by ROWID, since the table is very large.
  The person who did it made the assumption that, since using ROWID for ordering is much faster than using a common column, and the table never gets deleted or updated (inserts only), it would make sense to use ORDER BY ROWID instead of ORDER BY DATE_COLUMN .   When I tried to reproduce the select on SQL*PLUS, showing the rowid, it really gave me the wrong order. After that I tried this select:

 select max(ROWID) from table

 and it also returned the wrong row (a rowid from a row inserted on the table on 1999, when there are many records inserted on 2000 after that one), showing that the greatest ROWID really was not assigned to the last inserted row in the table.

 So, I had to change the 'order by' clause to use the date column, and everything worked again except by the fact that the report is much slower now.

 As I always believed that it should be true, can someone explain me the reason of this? We were using 7.3.4 when the report was made, and today we use 8.0.5 .

  Thanks for the help,

    Luis Derani ( lderani_at_uol.com.br )
    Syst.Analist
    Universo Online - SP - Brazil

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