Order by clause not working

Question

Hi, everyone,
I am trying to use the following insert statement to insert records in asc order. if i use the select statement alone the order by clause works fine, but when i use the same sql and add a insert into table statment the order by clause does not work. I am not getting the records in ascending order. could anybody help me in this regard?
INSERT INTO cat_sales_stg
select      b.SSC,                
     ltrim(rtrim(a.CAT_DESC)) cat_desc,                
     SUM(a.AMOUNT) AMOUNT               
FROM Trans a, SSC b                     
WHERE a.ACCOUNT_NUMBER = TO_CHAR(b.ACCOUNT_NUMBER)                    
     AND a.TMONTH >= 200905 AND a.TMONTH <= 200910                
     AND a.FORMAT_NAME = 'ABC'                
     AND b.BMONTH = 200910                
     AND b.SAMPLE = 3                
     AND b.BANNER_NAME = 'ABC'               
     AND b.MODEL_NAME = 'XYZ'               
group by b.SSC, ltrim(rtrim(a.CAT_DESC))
order by ssc,cat_desc
Thanks in advance

Answer 1

user10636796 wrote:
Hi, everyone,
I am trying to use the following insert statement to insert records in asc orderWhat Toon, William, and others have said is that you DON'T insert rows in a specific order. That is completely outside the way relational databases are designed. You insert rows as unordered and use an ORDER BY clause in a SELECT when reading them. ORDER BY is for SELECT statements, not INSERT.
In particular Toon poined out that we can't control where individual rows get stored.
There is a databas object called a varray that can store data in sorted order. I have never seen them used because selecting the data back out again is more work; using an ordinary table and an ORDER BY clause is much easier.