<<I like to sort tables frequently (LastName,FirstName,etc.) so that we don't always have to add an ORDER BY clause. Just lazy, I guess. This is probably not great practice but...
>> That's putting it mildly! If you always want the data sorted the same way, RBase offers an extension to standard SQL that will let you do it and never have to worry about sorting the data again. You can use ORDER BY with a view. To refactor an existing database to keep the CUSTOMER table sorted automatically, do this: RENAME TABLE Customer TO Customer_Raw NOCHECK CREATE VIEW Customer AS SELECT * FROM Customer_Raw ORDER BY LastName, FirstName You now have a fully editable single table view called Customer which looks _exactly_ like the customer table but will always appear in name order. You can insert, update, and delete from Customer as if it were a table, or you can perform those actions directly on Customer_Raw, but Customer will always give you the sorted customers. You'll take a slight performance hit for this, but not as big a hit as constantly having to rebuild the table or missing records because they got out of sequence. -- Larry
