Re: Order of rows in temp tables

Martin, Yes, the rows will be returned in the order in which they were inserted (physical order). You need not specify the order by clause. It will basically do a sequential scan; Unless, of course,if you have an index on ColA, in which case they will returned in the order of the indexed column for your query of : select ColA, Colb from TempA where ColA >= 100; Suhas Tembe stembe@msn.com Martin Brassard wrote in message <35842CFB.6B1B@sympatico.ca>... >Hi, > >We have made a little experiment with temp tables and would appreciate >that someone confirme the results. > >Let's say we have TableA (ColA Integer, ColB Char(10), ColC smallint); > >We issue the folowing query: > >Select ColA, ColB from TableA where ColC = 2 order by ColA, ColB into>temp TempA; > >Here whe have in TempA the subset of TableA that should be ordered by >ColA & ColB. > >Then we issue that other query: > >Select ColA, ColB from TempA;>or >Select ColA, ColB from TempA where ColA >= 100;> >In these cases, the rows from TempA are returned ordered by ColA & ColB, >even if we don`t specify the order by clause, probably because of the >physical order of the data in TempA. > >My question is : Can we assume that the rows of the temp table will >always be returned in the physical order of the table if we don`t >spedify an order by clause in our query. > >What makes me hesitate to implement this is that I think that the clause >"order by" with "into temp" was a invalid syntax in earlier version of >Informix. > >Thanks, > >Martin