question on SQL queries

I am writing an application where we need to analyze large amounts of data. We would like to split up the processing into multiple smaller chunks of rows that are executed on different machines. Each machine should be able to hook up to the database independently and pick up a chunk that is different from one that another machine is getting. One approach would be for each machine to independently execute the same select query and then for the first machine to process rows 1 to 1000, the second machine to process rows 1001 to 2000 etc. This approach would work only if it is guaranteed that the same select query that when executed at different times on the same data would always return the results in the same order. Is this a valid assumption for any Oracle server (including parallel server) and any arbitrarily complex select query? Also, are there other ways of solving this?

Thanks,
Jay Jayaprasad
SPSS Inc. Received on Tue Jan 11 2000 - 00:00:00 CET