Re: ORDER BY ALL

Hi Peter,

Thanks for your reply.

On Wed, Sep 23, 2026 at 3:00 PM Peter Eisentraut <peter(at)eisentraut(dot)org>
wrote:

> On 24.03.26 07:27, Rushabh Lathia wrote:
> > Please find the attached patch, to implement the ORDER BY ALL clause.
> > Commit ef38a4d97, implemented GROUP BY ALL clause, and this
> > feature follows the same pattern.
> >
> > ORDER BY ALL is a form of ORDER BY that automatically adds all
> > non-junk columns from the SELECT target list to the ORDER BY clause.
> >
> > This implementation supports:
> > - ORDER BY ALL (default ascending order)
> > - ORDER BY ALL ASC
> > - ORDER BY ALL DESC
> > - ORDER BY ALL NULLS FIRST/LAST
> > - ORDER BY ALL ASC/DESC NULLS FIRST/LAST
> >
> > The syntax works by creating a marker SortBy node with a NULL
> > node pointer that carries the sort direction and nulls ordering.
> > During query transformation, this marker is detected and expanded
> > to order by all non-junk columns in the target list with the
> > specified direction.
>
> I think this is a feature that is worth pursuing. The patch is still a
> bit rough.
>
> In the future, combine the patch with the code and the patch with the
> test and documentation into one patch.
>

Okay, I will work on this.

>
> Find a place to add the regression tests, instead of adding a new file.
> There are probably already places where ORDER BY syntax variants are
> tested. In any case, it shouldn't be its own parallel group.
>

Noted.

>
> The plpgsql_misc fails. Apparently, the expected file is misformatted.
>
> ORDER BY clauses don't only exist in top-level SELECT statements, they
> also appear in aggregate and window functions, for example. This patch
> doesn't handle this correctly. Consider:
>
> select array_agg(a order by all) from t;
> select rank() over (order by all) from t;
> select percentile_disc(0.5) within group (order by all) from t;
>
> These should either be rejected cleanly or do something useful.
> Currently, they either crash and produce an internal error. (Also add
> test cases.)
>

Sure will work on this.

Thanks,
Rushabh Lathia