From: Martijn Tonies Date: August 18 2009 7:31pm Subject: Re: Query Question List-Archive: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql/218430 Message-Id: <000e01ca203a$75b94ab0$1401a8c0@martijnws> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="utf-8"; reply-type=original Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit > To further emphasize this point: A table has no order by itself, That's not entirely true ;-) Records are stored in some kind of physical order, some DBMSses implement clustered keys, meaning that the records are stored ascending order on disk. However... >and you should make no assumptions about the order of rows you will get >back in a select statement, unless you use an ORDER BY clause. This is correct in that a -result set- does not have an "order" defined unless you specify an ORDER BY clause. With regards, Martijn Tonies Upscene Productions http://www.upscene.com Download Database Workbench for Oracle, MS SQL Server, Sybase SQL Anywhere, MySQL, InterBase, NexusDB and Firebird! Database questions? Check the forum: http://www.databasedevelopmentforum.com