On Mon, 1 Jul 2013 23:30:10 -0500 "Jay A. Kreibich" <j...@kreibi.ch> wrote:
> While rearranging the column order may not functionally change the > answer, a database is not given that flexibility in SQL. For > example, "SELECT *" *must* return the columns in the order they are > defined in the table definition. It isn't that most databases just > happen to do this-- the column order is actually predicated by the > standard. Thank you for the clarification; I didn't know the standard addressed that. I find the standard hard to read, even by the standard of standards. And, after all, it's pretty safe to ignore: that what most products do when it suits them! > > "sort by *" would imply that the order of the columns returned by > > '*' is meaningful, which it is not. "sort by the arbitrary order > > produced by 'select *'" isn't even deterministic. > > In SQL column order *is* deterministic, so the sort order would also > be deterministic. Likely meaningless, but still deterministic. Yes, I was musing about that today. "sort by *" could certainly be deterministic, depending on how it's defined. --jkl _______________________________________________ sqlite-users mailing list sqlite-users@sqlite.org http://sqlite.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users
