Default Row Order in Select Query - SQL Server 2008 VS SQL 2012

Default row order in SELECT query - SQL Server 2008 vs SQL 2012

You need to go back and add ORDER BY clauses to your code because without them the order is never guaranteed. You were "lucky" in the past that you always got the same order but it wasn't because SQL Server 2008 guaranteed it in anyway. It most likely had to do with your indexes or how the data was being stored on the disk.

If you moved to a new host when you upgraded the difference in hardware configuration alone could have changed the way your queries execute. Not to mention the fact that the new server would have recalculated statistics on the tables and the SQL Server 2012 query optimizer probably does things a bit differently than the one in SQL Server 2008.

It is a fallacy that you can rely on the order of a result set in SQL without explicitly stating the order you want it in. SQL results NEVER have an order you can rely on without using an ORDER BY clause. SQL is built around set theory. Query results are basically sets (or multi-sets).

Itzik Ben-Gan gives a good description of set theory in relation to SQL in his book Microsoft SQL Server 2012 T-SQL Fundamentals

Set theory, which originated with the mathematician Georg Cantor, is
one of the mathematical branches on which the relational model is
based. Cantor's definition of a set follows:

By a "set" we mean any collection M into a whole of definite, distinct
objects m (which are called the "elements" of M) of our perception or
of our thought. - Joseph W. Dauben and Georg Cantor (Princeton
University Press, 1990)

After a thorough explanation of the terms in the definition Itzik then goes on to say:

What Cantor's definition of a set leaves out is probably as important
as what it includes. Notice that the definition doesn't mention any
order among the set elements. The order in which set elements are
listed is not imporant. The formal notation for listing set elements
uses curly brackets: {a, b, c}. Because order has no relevance you can
express the same set as {b, a, c} or {b, c, a}. Jumping ahead to the
set of attributes (called columns in SQL) that make up the header of a
relation (called a table in SQL), an element is supposed to be
identified by name - not ordinal position. Similarly, consider the set
of tuples (called rows by SQL) that make up the body of the relation;
an element is identified by its key values - not by position. Many
programmers have a hard time adapting to the idea that, with respect
to querying tables, there is no order among the rows. In other words,
a query against a table can return rows in any order unless you
explicitly request that the data be sorted in a specific way, perhaps
for presentation purposes.

But regardless of the academic definition of a set even the implementation in SQL server has never guaranteed any order in the results. This MSDN blog post from 2005 by a member of the query optimizer team states that you should not rely on the order from intermediate operations at all.

The reordering rules can and will violate this assumption (and do so
when it is inconvenient to you, the developer ;). Please understand
that when we reorder operations to find a more efficient plan, we can
cause the ordering behavior to change for intermediate nodes in the
tree. If you’ve put an operation in the tree that assumes a
particular intermediate ordering, it can break.

This blog post by Conor Cunningham (Architect, SQL Server Core Engine) "No Seatbelt - Expecting Order without ORDER BY" is about SQL Server 2008. He has a table with 20k rows in it with a single index that appears to always return rows in the same order. Adding an ORDER BY to the query doesn't even change the execution plan, so it isn't like adding one in makes the query more expensive if the optimizer realizes it doesn't need it. But once he adds another 20k rows to the table suddenly the query plan changes and now it uses parallelism and the results are no longer ordered!

The hard part here is that there is no reasonable way for any external
user to know when a plan will change . The space of all plans is huge
and hurts your head to ponder. SQL Server's optimizer will change
plans, even for simple queries, if enough of the parameters change.
You may get lucky and not have a plan change, or you can just not
think about this problem and add an ORDER BY.

If you need more convincing just read these posts:

• Without ORDER BY, there is no default sort order. - Alexander Kuznetsov
• Order in the court! - Thomas Kyte
• Order of a Result Set in SQL - Timothy Wiseman

SELECT * INTO retains ORDER BY in SQL Server 2008 but not 2012

How can you tell what the order is inside a table by using select * from #result? There is no guarantee as to the order in a select query.

However, the results are different on SQL Fiddle. If you want to guarantee that the results are the same, then add a primary key. Then the insertion order is guaranteed:

CREATE TABLE MyTable(Name VARCHAR(50), SortOrder INT)
INSERT INTO MyTable SELECT 'b', 2 UNION ALL SELECT 'c', 3 UNION ALL SELECT 'a', 1 UNION ALL SELECT 'e', 5 UNION ALL SELECT 'd', 4


select top 0 * into result from MyTable;

alter table Result add id int identity(1, 1) primary key;

insert into Result(name, sortorder)
    SELECT * FROM MyTable
    ORDER BY SortOrder;

I still abhor doing select * from Result after this. But yes, it does return them in the correct order in both SQL Server 2008 and 2012. Not only that, but because SQL Server guarantees that primary keys are inserted in the proper order, the records are even guaranteed to be in the correct order in this case.

BUT . . . just because the records are in a particular order on the pages doesn't mean they will be retrieved in that order with no order by clause.

How can I keep the order of column values in a union select?

If you're not selecting from tables?

Then you could insert VALUES, instead of a select with unions.

insert into @QuestionOptionMapping (RateCode) values
 ('PD0116')
,('PL0090')
,('PL0091')
,('DD0026')
,('DD0025')

Or in your query, change all the UNION to UNION ALL.

The difference between a UNION and a UNION ALL is that a UNION will remove duplicate rows.
While UNION ALL just stiches the resultsets from the selects together.

And for UNION to find those duplicates, internally it first has to sort them.

But a UNION ALL doesn't care about uniqueness, so it doesn't need to sort.

A 3th option would be to simply change from 1 insert statement to multiple insert statements.
One insert per value. Thus avoiding UNION completely.

But that anti-golfcoding method is also the most wordy.

---

Related Topics