In what order are SQL results returned if there is no ORDER BY clause?

In what order are SQL results returned if there is no ORDER BY clause?

3 Answers. If you don’t specify an ORDER BY , then there is NO ORDER defined. The results can be returned in an arbitrary order – and that might change over time, too. There is no “natural order” or anything like that in a relational database (at least in all that I know of).

Can an ORDER BY clause be used without a group by clause?

The groupby clause is used to group the data according to particular column or row. 2. Having cannot be used without groupby clause. groupby can be used without having clause with the select statement.

How do you sort data without using ORDER BY clause in SQL?

Using TOP in a SELECT statement, without a subsequent ORDER BY clause, is legal in SQL Server, but meaningless because asking for the TOP x rows implies that the data is guaranteed to be in a certain order, and tables have no implicit logical order. You must specify the order.

Can we use ORDER BY while querying on a view?

The ORDER BY clause is invalid in views, inline functions, derived tables, subqueries, and common table expressions, unless TOP, OFFSET or FOR XML is also specified.

Does SQL return in order?

Having your data returned to you in some meaningful sorted order is important sometimes. If you don’t tell SQL Server you want to order the results of a SELECT statement then there is no guarantee that your result set will come back in a particular order.

Can SQL query have HAVING clause without GROUP BY?

A HAVING clause without a GROUP BY clause is valid and (arguably) useful syntax in Standard SQL. If this clause is not GROUP BY, the intermediate result table is considered a single group with no grouping columns of the previous clause of the subselect.

Can a SELECT statement have no order by clause?

As I know, from the relational database theory, a select statement without an order by clause should be considered to have no particular order. But actually in SQL Server and Oracle (I’ve tested on those 2 platforms), if I query from a table without an order by clause multiple times, I always get the results in the same order.

Can you query a table without an ORDER BY clause?

But actually in SQL Server and Oracle (I’ve tested on those 2 platforms), if I query from a table without an order by clause multiple times, I always get the results in the same order. Does this behavior can be relied on? Anyone can help to explain a little? No, that behavior cannot be relied on.

What happens when no order by is specified in SQL?

With SQL Server, if no ORDER BY is specified, the results are returned in the quickest way possible. Therefore without an ORDER BY, make no assumptions about the order. Show activity on this post. As it was already said you should never rely on the “default order” because it doesn’t exist.

Are there any queries that guarantee to retrieve all rows in the same order?

Of course, there are queries, that guarantee to retrieve the rows in the same order every time they are executed, though they have no order_by_clause. Trivial examples – there also are nontrivial ones – are queries that guarantee to retrieve at most one row. On sets with cardinality less than or equal to 1 there exists only one ordering.