On 24 January 2012 09:29, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 11:17 PM, Douglas Eric <sekk...@hotmail.com> wrote: >> I suggest to change this behavior. If one makes a SELECT statement without >> any ORDER BY, it would be >> clever to automatically sort by the first primary key found in the query, if >> any.
I recently submitted a problem report with a product that had that behaviour. The data involved was a table of database ID's and text labels for use in a drop-down list. In such cases, sorting the data by primary key (the ID) is rarely what you want! For example, if you have a listing of car brands, sorting them by some arbitrary ID quickly makes such a list impossible to use. You want such a list sorted alphabetically. Defaulting to sorting by ID (like aforementioned product did) does not make sense in such a case. So, this is not just a bad idea from a performance perspective, it's also often not what you want. Of course specifying a "different" sort order than the default one would solve the issue, but that's not the point here. -- If you can't see the forest for the trees, Cut the trees and you'll see there is no forest. -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
