Re: Bypassing useless ORDER BY in a VIEW

[Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>]

"Dean Gibson (DB Administrator)" <postgresql(at)ultimeth(dot)com> writes:
> Of course, where ORDER BY in a VIEW is really helpful, is with OFFSET 
> and/or LIMIT clauses (which are also PostgreSQL extensions), which is 
> equivalent to what you point out.

Right, which is the main reason why we allow it.  I think that these
are sort of poor man's cases of things that SQL2003 covers with
"windowing functions".

The SQL spec treats ORDER BY as a cosmetic thing that you can slap onto
the final output of a SELECT.  They don't consider it useful in
subqueries (including views) because row ordering is never supposed to
be a semantically significant aspect of a set of rows.

			regards, tom lane