Re: Order of rows in temp tables

Martin, I talked to Informix about this last year, I was using v7.20 and they said that the order of data can not be guaranteed in a temp table. You should always do the order by when presenting data from the temp table. Regards David Ashby ______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________ Subject: Order of rows in temp tables Author: <martin.brassard1@sympatico.ca; MBrassard@magrit.com> at WCA-INET Date: 14/6/98 8:11 PM 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 intotemp 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