Re: Bypassing useless ORDER BY in a VIEW

From: Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>
To: pgsql-performance(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: Bypassing useless ORDER BY in a VIEW
Date: 2008-02-28 21:52:15
Message-ID: 16851.1204235535@sss.pgh.pa.us
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"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

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