Re: SQL: UNION ALL and ORDER BY

> I have an SQL QUERY containing a number of SELECT FROM WHERE's joined
> by UNION ALL statements. Following the last statement is a single
> ORDER BY clause.
 

> On my system the ORDER BY affects the order of all the results from
> the preceding SELECTs.

Of course; ORDER BY operates on the preceding complete set, and I think in fact you can only legally have only one ORDER BY statement, which has to be at the end of the query (and some would claim it's not even part of the query, because sets are by definition not ordered).

> As I may wish to port this to other databases, is the feature
> described above standard SQL or specific to my implementation?

yes, I think so.

                                                                      Philip

-- 
If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some. (Kraulis)
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Philip Lijnzaad, lijnzaad_at_ebi.ac.uk \ European Bioinformatics Institute,rm A2-08
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