Re: Default Query Result Ordering Details

"D. Robbins" <darylrobbins_at_gmail.com> wrote in message news:1172885312.641615.98210_at_z35g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
>
> Is there any documentation available on the default query result
> ordering in the absence of an ORDER BY clause? I looked through the
> Oracle docs and could not find much. I do not plan to depend on this
> behavior but I am curious on how it works. Thank you.
>

I remember once, after I migrated an application from Oracle 8i to 10g, that several web pages in the application had their result lists ordered differently. Of course, the DBA was blamed, who then started digging into the developer's code, to found out that several queries lacked the "ORDER BY" clause. But, like you, I couldn't find out in the docs if there actually was a sorting difference between Oracle 8i and 10g in the lack of ORDER BY. It could also be related to the fact that the rows were arranged differently during the import.
Tip of the day : always use ORDER BY even when the results look good without it.

Matthias Received on Sun Mar 04 2007 - 05:26:59 CST