Oracle insert problem(records not in the order they are inserted)

Question

hi, all:
I tried to insert a word list into a oracle table, everything is fine except that the words are not in the order they are inserted. For example, the words are inserted in the following sequence:
accreted     
accreting     
accretion     
accretionary     
accretive     
bladebone
bladed     
bladeless
bladelike
When I retrived the resultset from the table and iterate through each of the record, the words are not in the order inserted, i.e., it may look like this,
accreted     
accreting     
bladebone
bladed     
accretion     
accretionary     
accretive     
bladeless
bladelike
This strange phenomenon won't happen when the word list is small, like 500 words or so, but when the number of words reaches around 10,000, it takes place. My coworker also experienced this problem when trying to insert large volume of data into oracle table.
The code I used to insert into the DB table:
BufferedReader reader=new BufferedReader(new FileReader("C:\\Dictionary.txt"));
while( (line=reader.readLine())!=null )
     sql="INSERT INTO DICT " +
     "VALUES ('" + line +"')";                         
     statement.executeUpdate(sql);
Any advice will be highly appreciated,
thanks

Answer 1

Well, the best thing to do is follows scsi-boy's advice and add the additional column and either put a sequence number in it from the Java side as you insert, or use an Oracle sequence object to put a sequence number in it from the Oracle side (which is sort of like an auto-generated value, but different).
Note that an Oracle sequence generates numbers in sequence, but possibly with gaps (usually if the database is rebooted), unless you do some things that slow sequences down substantially. Sequences can also be something of a bottleneck on RAC clusters. See:
http://www.dizwell.com/oracle/articles/autonumbering.html
However, if your coworker is commiting after each and every insert (which is bad form and slows the database down, -10 points), and if your coworker is also never ever ever updating the columns after they've been inserted, and if your coworker is using Oracle 10g and not some older version such as 9i, then your coworker could use the ORA_ROWSCN pseudo-column to order by. Those are very very severe constraints and you shouldn't begin to consider doing it that way without a very good reason, and right now you and your coworker wouldn't know a good reason if it snuck up and bit you on the butt, you've got a lot of learning the basics first.