Posted by Erland Sommarskog on 03/23/06 00:33

Herb Caudill (herb@caudillweb.com) writes:
> The fact of the matter is that SQL server used to work the way most
> naïve users would expect it to work - that is, views and functions with
> an ORDER BY clause returned ordered results. This worked 100% of the
> time in my experience, and I depended on it. The fact that there was a
> footnote in an RFC or a technical specification somewhere the explained
> that this was not guaranteed is beside the point; as far as I'm
> concerned this is a breach of backward compatibility, and your
> explanation that the new approach gives me better query optimization
> does not interest me at all.

Permit me to point that it is a matter of a "footnote", but a very
basic property of SQL. queries return tables, and tables are unordered
sets. If you need a certain order from a query, you need to use ORDER BY.
This apply to all RDBMS products.

This is no stranger that in a C program you should initialize all your
variables, although you in some cases can assume that will have a certain
value.



By the wau, I would like to express the hope that you in some few years
will start to care about performance. Because that would mean that your
business has taken off.

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

Books Online for SQL Server 2005 at
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2005/downloads/books.mspx
Books Online for SQL Server 2000 at
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/prodinfo/previousversions/books.mspx

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