The developers need shooting (metaphorically, of course). Oracle, as far
as I can recall (and I admit, I only go back to 7.3), have never
guaranteed a result set being returned in a specific order absent an
ORDER BY, and any competent developer should known that.

Surely not every one of those thousand statements would need rewriting,
though? I can't believe every single statement is dependent upon records
being returned in a specific order. It might take a lot of going
through, but it's more likely (I would hope!) that you could identify a
limited subset requiring ORDER BY clauses.

If this was a third-party package I would seriously consider going back
to the vendor. Relying upon any 'implied' order from the database is
shoddy work.

> All you can do is cuss at the developers ... without an ORDER BY, you just
> can't count on
> controlling that order. You could put some sort of kludge in place that
> seems to work, and
> years down the line someone else will cuss at you because their new version
> of Oracle --
> or their migration to another RDBMS -- returns rows not in the "correct"
> order.
>
> Bill
>

> Hi, Martin:
>
> Thank you for your advice! I exactly agree with you !
> But, this is not I can control, because application is developed several
> years ago, we migrate the database recently and get the trouble.
> And I have to figure out what I can do without rewrite thousands SQLs in
> application.
--
Martin

'Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the
shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes,
and forgot' - Dream Country, Neil Gaiman

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