The Order of Data: defaults, performance, determinism & paging
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community 5
strategic 4
personal 8
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Data ordering and paging insights directly applicable to database and data engineering work.
Summary
SQL queries without ORDER BY yield undefined, database-specific ordering. In Postgres, the default order appears insertion-based but shifts after UPDATE (which is DELETE+INSERT), DELETE, or VACUUM, making LIMIT/OFFSET paging non-deterministic. Developers must always specify ORDER BY for predictable pagination.