ORDER BY not allowed in INSERT..SELECT ?

Question

I'm trying to INSERT..SELECT into a table, the SELECT should be ordered by a clause, but Oracle (8.1.7) does not permit that.
INSERT INTO SumTable
SELECT Field1,Field2
FROM FullTable
WHERE field1 = 1
ORDER BY field2;
I get: ORA-00933: SQL command not properly ended
It doesn't matter if the "order by" field is part of the SELECT or not. When I remove the ORDER BY the INSERT works perfectly. Oracle docs do not mention this limitation. Is this known issue? Can I make it to work?
I do have a solution in PL/SQL, open a cursor for the SELECT with the ORDER BY, INSERT one row at a time in the cursor loop, but its too slow when I have more than 10K records to insert.
Thanks,
Yoram Ayalon

Answer 1

I have to take issue with this. rows are inserted based on the blocks on the freelist.
Watch.
We will create a feeder table.
SQL> create table feeder (ID) pctfree 0 as select rownum from all_objects;
Table created.
SQL> create table FRED (mycol integer) pctfree 0 pctused 99;
{99 so that free space is reused almost immediately for demo only }
Table created.
SQL> analyze table fred compute statistics;
Table analyzed.
SQL> select blocks from user_tables where table_name='FRED';
BLOCKS
0
SQL> insert into fred (mycol) select id from feeder where id <=32000;
32000 rows created.
{ So we now have a tightly packed table. Blocksize 8k by- the-by )
SQL> analyze table fred compute statistics;
SQL> select blocks from user_Segments where segment_name='FRED';
BLOCKS
48
{ Ok : 48 blocks.  Now we will get rid of 1/2 of the rows scattered throughout the 48 }
SQL> delete from fred where mod(mycol,2) =0;
16000 rows deleted.
SQL> analyze table fred compute statistics;
Table analyzed.
SQL> select blocks from user_Segments where segment_name='FRED';
BLOCKS
48
{ Ok : Still 48 blocks since we haven't been inserting only deleting }
[ if we looked at user_Tables now it would show most if not all of the blocks on the freelist given the 99 PCTUSED }
{ now let's chuck in another 16000 ordered rows }
SQL> insert into fred (mycol) select id from feeder where id <=16000 order by id
16000 rows created.
SQL> analyze table fred compute statistics;
Table analyzed.
SQL> select blocks from user_Segments where segment_name='FRED';
BLOCKS
48
{ look ! no extra blocks ! 
-> it must have filled the non-contiguous holes in the blocks
-> the rows are not physically ordered.