Join, union, and order

Question

I've been looking at some of the other posts on this and have not seen my exact problem (granted, I have not looked at all of the posts, as there are quite a few, so please forgive me if this has been covered before).
I have two tables, A & B, that I want to join. They have different data. They both contain fields 1 & 2 which I want to sort by. There are records in A that are not in B, and vice versa.
I've tried all sorts of things. The closest I've come to what I'm looking for looks like this:
select * from A, B
where A1 = B1 (+)
union
select * from A, B
where A1 (+) = B1
order by A2, A1
This gives me all the records I'm looking for, but not sorted in the right order. The problem is with records that are in B, but not in A. When sorting by A2, A1 the fields for records in B and not in A are null and appear at the end.
And yes, I've tried using numbers instead of field names in the order by. Didn't work either. I also tried using NVL to tell it to use B2 if A2 is null.
Right, left, and outer join do not work on the version I'm using.
Any ideas??

Answer 1

here is the example
SQL> desc t
Name                                      Null?    Type
COL                                                VARCHAR2(30 CHAR)
ID                                                 NUMBER
SQL> desc t_n
Name                                      Null?    Type
N                                                  NUMBER(38)
SQL> select * from t
  2  union
   select * from t_n;
select * from t
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-01789: query block has incorrect number of result columns
Note: above error coz no of columns are not same
SQL> ed
Wrote file afiedt.buf
  1  select col,id from t
  2  union
  3* select n,null id from t_n
SQL> /
select col,id from t
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-01790: expression must have same datatype as corresponding expression
NOTE: got above error as the data type of the column are not same
SQL> ed
Wrote file afiedt.buf
  1  select col,id from t
  2  union
  3* select null , n from t_n
SQL> /
COL                                    ID
1#@#2#@#3                               1
4#@#5#@#6                               2
                                        1
                                      123
SQL> ed
Wrote file afiedt.buf
  1  select col,id from t
  2  union
  3  select null , n from t_n
  4* order by id
SQL> /
COL                                    ID
1#@#2#@#3                               1
                                        1
4#@#5#@#6                               2
                                      123