Thanks to those who responded. I have solved my problem by noting the advice to use a select with order by. In particular, I need to export the data to a csv file anyway, so I use the following copy command:
COPY (SELECT household_name, family_list, street_address, city, state, zip, phone_list, email_list FROM "household_data" ORDER BY household_name ) TO '/tmp/household_data.csv' WITH (FORMAT CSV, HEADER); This works. Regards, Dan > On Feb 16, 2021, at 12:35 PM, David G. Johnston <david.g.johns...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > > On Tuesday, February 16, 2021, Dan Nessett <dness...@yahoo.com > <mailto:dness...@yahoo.com>> wrote: > Thanks Peter. The listing of the result is from pg-admin 4.30 using view/edit > data applied to the household_data table. In the past this has always > returned the table contents in the ORDR BY sort order. Do I need to specify > some preference in pg_admin to guarantee this? > > pgAdmin4 might be keying off of the presence of an index, which this table > doesn’t have. > > David J.