Dodgy Order By detection

Question

Hi all
Just found an annoying bug in Oracle.
(perhaps I should say that the bug is most likely more in Oracle clients, like TOAD and APEX).
I'm not sure if this has been pointed out already, but it's really quite poor.
Say you have a query, like this:
select member_name, member_points
from member_tableIn TOAD or APEX you can then sort the columns however you want (not using an order by, but by using their in-built sort functions).
Now, if you include an order by...
select member_name, member_points
from member_table
order by member_pointsYou can no longer do a column sort in TOAD or APEX.
This seems to make sense, given the results are already sorted.
And the only method used to detect if results can be sorted or not is by the presence or absence of the "order by" clause.
Now, normally that would be fine - if your query orders it's results, then you probably don't want to sort them, right?
The problem?
Instead of analysing the query properly, all that's done is that the exact string "order by" (not case-sensitive) is checked.
If this string is in your query, you cannot sort your results.
Example:
If you have the following query:
select member_name "Member Name", member_points "Order By"
from member_tableYou cannot sort your results.
This is obviously completely stupid, as the "order by" string is only being used as a title!!
In fact, the detection is so bad that while this won't work...
select member_name, member_points
from member_table
order by member_pointsThis will...
select member_name, member_points
from member_table
order
by member_pointsor this...
select member_name, member_points
from member_table
order  by member_points(2 spaces between "order" and "by")
Buggy!
Anyone else encountered this problem?
So far it happens in TOAD and APEX.

Answer 1

Not an Oracle RDBMS bug, but an APEX bug. (and no, I do not give a damn for TOAD ;-) ).
The problem as you've identified is caused by APEX scanning the SQL, detecting an "ORDER BY" clause, and then assuming the results are already sorted and not allowing you enable APEX's column sort feature on the results.
I ran into it using analytical SQL. My work around is to simply add gunk in between the ORDER and BY tokens.. e.g. (actual snippet from an APEX report query)
row_number() over (order /*--*/ by SUM(bytes) desc) as ORDER_BY_BYTES,
This results in the APEX parser not thinking that the result set is sorted.
You should however raise this issue on the APEX forum here - not really applicable to PL/SQL or SQL or the Oracle RDBMS at all.