Re: order by question

On 23 Okt, 17:34, sybra...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Thu, 23 Oct 2008 07:34:51 -0700 (PDT), sbr...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
I have not been able to get a resultset which is unsorted acording to
x.z but need to know that this would not happen in a productive
environment.

By definition all SQL prodiuces a set. The set is always an
*unordered* collection *by design*, because that is mathematical
theory.
Ergo: Oracle does NOT guarantee any resultset is according to any
order, when there is no order by clause in the top level of the query.
It would be very silly to 'rely' on a specific ordering, and raises
suspicions your 'productive environment' is not so productive, as it
is processing a set as a bunch of records.
Which it shouldn't as that wouldn't scale.

--
Sybrand Bakker
Senior Oracle DBA

If you dont have anything valuable to add then dont. Do you actually
have an example of when the resultset is not ordered because I have
not been able to produce it. If yes then please say so. That would be
valuable information for me. I already know that "Oracle does NOT
guarantee any resultset is according to any order, when there is no
order by clause in the top level of the query". That is pretty much
basic stuff and this information is not valuable to me. And yes the
system is productive. The select is in a function which returns a
sys_refcursor to a java application. The select is based on tables
where several of them contains more than 10 million records and is
working well thus far. I do not see why it would not be scalable.

Slavko
.