Re: odd ( to me ) question

EdStevens wrote:

> In layman's terms:
>
> "By design, there is *no* default sort sequence. Without an ORDER BY
> clause, the ordering of the returned rows is undefined and
> unpredictable."
>
>

I think I would phrase it slightly differently. Something like

"Oracle is designed to return rows that match the query specification exactly, as efficiently as possible, where the query specification does not specify an order this means that Oracle can use techniques that return data efficiently, but unordered."

In terms of the read-only data I'd expect the data to be returned in the same order (whatever that was) until some other change relevant to the optimizer happened, for example regathering stats or restarting the database.

-- 
Niall Litchfield
Oracle DBA
http://www.orawin.info/services