Posted by Erland Sommarskog on 10/21/05 01:28

David Portas (REMOVE_BEFORE_REPLYING_dportas@acm.org) writes:
> You don't believe everything MS tell you, do you? :-)

If MS says "we guarantee this", and I get an unexpected result, that's
a bug, for which I can require a hotfix, if there are business reasons
enough for it. If they say "this is undefined", I am left on my own in
the wilderness.

It might be that this was only for SQL 2005, but I'm quite sure that
it applied to SQL 2000 as well. I need to research this a little more.
(The repro does produce an ordered output when I test on SQL 2005.

> Thanks due to Gert-Jan for the following repro. Tested on SP4 (with or
> without MAXDOP) it doesn't order the INSERT (YMMV). Admittedly it might
> sometimes be possible to order *some* INSERTs but how are we supposed to
> know which will work, which won't and which will fall apart after then
> next hotfix?

With that reasoning, how could you trust SQL Server at all? After the
next hotfix, it may say that 2 + 2 = 5.

I recall that during the beta 2 phase of SQL 2000, someone in the beta
groups asked about this, because he had a case where he did not get the
expected results. But he also reported that with the RTM version, he did
get the correct results. I also recall that I tried to produce a repro
where the IDENTITY values did not follow the order. My plan was then
to open a case, in order to get a statement whether I had a bug or
not. However, I was never able to produce such a repro.

So saying that it "works sometimes" is quite an understatement. It works
most of the time, and in this particular case the question was about a
one-off thing.


--
Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP, esquel@sommarskog.se

Books Online for SQL Server SP3 at
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/techinfo/productdoc/2000/books.asp

[Back to original message]