ORDER BY in view definitions

Question

ORDER BY was not allowed in view definitions in 7.3.4. It is allowed in 8.1.6 but I have not seen any documentation to say when or why it was introduced.
There is an old rule that a select statement does not guarantee the order of rows without an order by. Does this mean that this rule is no longer strictly true, ie the order IS guaranteed if selecting from a view which itself contains an order by ?
If the order of rows in this case is NOT guaranteed, then why allow an order by in the view definition?
This was brought to my notice by other writers to this forum who have pointed out that
(if the view does indeed guarantee the order of rows), then the pseudo column ROWNUM at last becomes useful for applying sequence numbers to queried rows if an in-line view with an order by is used. ROWNUM used to be of limited use because it was assigned before the order by.

Answer 1

SriDHAR,
Please don't take offense. My comment was not aimed at you. When I wrote the post, I was expressing some cumulative frustration at various things about these forums, including the unpredictable performance of the search feature, lack of forum monitoring, and a series of recent posts on this topic, not just this thread, that included various correct and incorrect responses and repetition of the question and starting of new threads on the same topic by the same people, even after correct responses were given, and requests for things like a "guarantee" even after "various people have suggested that technique". What I had in mind, when I wrote the portion of the post that you quoted, was some of the various responses that constituted nothing more than repetition of the question as if hadn't already been posed and answered. I certainly don't fault you or anyone else for responding with an answer. Perhaps hearing it from one more person one more time or explained in a slightly different way will make a difference. I certainly did not mean to imply that my explanation was any better than yours. I was merely expressing frustration at my prior efforts having gone to waste, since people are apparently unable to sufficiently refine the search criteria and wade through the duplicate topics to find it and similar efforts by many of us on various topics.
I encourage those who ask questions to search for the answers first themselves, both in the on-line documentation, where the master index search seems to work very well, and in the forums, where the search mechanism seems to work sporadically. I know I have seen some others post similar suggestions and unfortunately they are frequently not well-received, although sometimes that may be due to how the suggestion was phrased.
On some other forums, the discussions are monitored by multiple moderators or system operators who quickly remove duplicate posts, move posts to the correct forums, provide links to previous discussions on the same topic, and guide new users as to how to use the forums. The end result is that the forums are a lot less cluttered with repetitive stuff, which makes reading, searching, and everything easier and faster. Unfortunately, we don't seem to have that on this forum. I have heard that the monitoring of these forums by Oracle personnel is voluntary. I have noticed that same Oracle personnel, like Robert Pang, routinely respond to certain topics, like utl_smtp, and Goeff Lee seems to have adopted the Objects forum. A long time ago, Rick Post did a good job of monitoring this SQL and PL/SQL forum, but he vanished long ago. That was before the new forum format. So, as far as I know, we don't currently seem to have a monitor for this forum. I noticed that, for a while, the Forumm Administrator tried to monitor the Feedback forums, but was overwhelmed, and said "I give up" and appears to have quit deleting or moving off-topic posts, and rarely even responds to on-topic ones anymore. The longer it goes unchecked, the worse it gets.
I have seen some other forums, where, lacking official moderation, groups of frequent responders have taken it upon themselves to do what they can. Obviously, we can't delete duplicates or move things to the correct forums, and requests for moderators to do this has fallen on deaf ears, but we can point out duplicates and suggest searching documentation and previous posts. I would be interested in hearing what everyone else thinks we should do. Should we try to act as monitors ourselves? Or should we simply ignore duplicates and not respond? Or should we provide links to prior posts? Or should we respond to everything anew? Eventually, the forums just get so cluttered that, regardless of original plan, things go unanswered, simply due to too many posts and too little time. Or do we need to inundate the feedback suggestions forum with requests for better search functions and monitoring. I know several have already been posted. I figured that once a suggestion was made, they didn't need to see duplicates, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe they need to hear it from all of us. What does everyone else think? I have been biting my tongue for a long time.
Barbara