Is order by clause allowed in a subquery

Question

Is there any reason why or why not you should do an 'order by' in a subquery?

Answer 1

You should use it if the subquery uses some kind of LIMIT / TOP.

SQL Server will not allow it unless the subquery contains TOP or FOR XML clause as well:

-- Fails
WITH    q(id) AS
        (
        SELECT  1
        UNION ALL
        SELECT  2
        )
SELECT  *
FROM    (
        SELECT  *
        FROM    q
        ORDER BY
                id DESC
        ) q2

-- Succeeds
WITH    q(id) AS
        (
        SELECT  1
        UNION ALL
        SELECT  2
        )
SELECT  *
FROM    (
        SELECT  TOP 1 *
        FROM    q
        ORDER BY
                id DESC
        ) q2

-- Succeeds, but ORDER BY is ignored
WITH    q(id) AS
        (
        SELECT  1
        UNION ALL
        SELECT  2
        )
SELECT  *
FROM    (
        SELECT  TOP 100 PERCENT *
        FROM    q
        ORDER BY
                id DESC
        ) q2

Answer 2

Unless you use top it is not useful since you will be ordering in the outer query anyway

Answer 3

Smarter people say that is not proper/valid way to do it. In my case SELECT TOP 100 PERCENT in sub-query solved the problem.

Cheers

Answer 4

It's totally legit. I.e. SELECT id FROM entries WHERE author_id IN (SELECT id FROM authors ORDER BY name DESC) but you'll really get the same results usually.

Answer 5

You can do it, but I wouldn't usually unless you have a need.

The optimiser will ignore it (or throw an error?)

See "Intermediate materialisation" for some usages.

Answer 6

Yes: It should not be done, because it does not make sense conceptually.

The subquery will be used in some outer query (otherwise it would be pointless), and that outer query will have to do ordering anyway, so there's no point ordering the subquery.

This is because query results in SQL will come in no particular order, unless you use an explicit ORDER. So even if you used ORDER in the subquery, you have no guarantee that this will affect the order of the results from the outer query; so it's pointless.

It may of course make a difference in some specific RDBMS because of its implementation, but that will be implementation-specific, and not something you should rely on.

Edit: Of course, if you use TOP or LIMIT in the subquery, you will need to use ORDER. But that's not standard SQL anyway...