Change Behaviour of Sorting in 11g to 9i -Upgrading form 9i to 11g Issue

Question

We are trying to perform only Select * from the Table(There are more than 25 columns in the table) with mentioned ORDER By Clause.
But the same query fetches the result set in below diffrenet ORDER in 9i and 11g
Query will look like this :-
The CURSOR SELECT Statement:
CURSOR Cur1 IS
SELECT *
FROM TABLE_NAME
WHERE CLAUSE
ORDER BY
COLUMN1 DESC , COLUMN2 ASC,COLUMN3 ASC;
COLUMN1 Value will HOLD only Y or N or ‘ ’ ----Empty
COLUMN2 Value will HOLD only Y or N or ‘ ’ ----Empty
COLUMN3 Value will HOLD any NUMBER value or ‘ ’ ----Empty
9i –ORDER of Result set
Rownum Record
1. 1234
2. 5678
3. 8888
4. 9999
5. 3333
6. 4444
7. 5555
8. 1111
11g –ORDER of Result set
Rownum Record
1. 8888
2. 9999
3. 1234
4. 5678
5. 3333
6. 4444
7. 1111
8. 5555
We tried with below Options to Enable the
Oracle Optimizer feature to behave like 9.2.0 version.
1. ALTER session set optimizer_features_enable='9.2.0'; -
SELECT /*+ optimizer_features_enable=('9.2.0' )*/ *
FROM TABLE_NAME
WHERE
ORDER BY COL1 DESC , COL2 ASC,COL3 ASC;
Then also we didn’t the same ORDER of result set.
2. alter session set "_newsort_enabled"=FALSE; - Altered the Session value. Then also ORDER of Result Set is Different from 9i.
3. ALTER session SET NLS_SORT=BINARY – ; - Altered the Session value. Then also ORDER of Result Set is Different from 9i.
After altering the sessions, the altered value is correctly set to the corresponding environment variable in 11g server, but still the order is different from 9i and 11g.
Can anyone help on this.??
Is there any way like this to make 11g oracle Complier to behave as 9i Compiler. Since The Inbuilt compiler algorithm of 9i and 11g are Entirely diff. The records are not coming in that Order
Thanks!
Bala

Answer 1

This is expected behavior - see the explanation in MOS Doc 456707.1 (Order Of Data Retrieval Differs after upgrading 9i To 10g) - essentially, releases before 10g were not fully compliant with ANSI standards.
Explictly call out all the columns in the ORDER BY clause to fix your issue. Why does the order matter ?
HTH
Srini