Physical Sort on Table data

Question

Is there a way to sort the records of a table physically?
The order by clause does a logical sort on the table data that is temporary.
Can we sort the records permanently?

Answer 1

In my environment your query is using a [ INDEX FAST FULL SCAN :|http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_01/server.102/b14211/optimops.htm#i52044] which is not guaranteed to follow physical ordering:
>
It cannot be used to eliminate a sort operation, because the data is not ordered by the index key. It reads the entire index using multiblock reads, unlike a full index scan, and can be parallelized.
>
SQL> select * from v$version;
BANNER
Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition Release 10.2.0.1.0 - Prod
PL/SQL Release 10.2.0.1.0 - Production
CORE     10.2.0.1.0     Production
TNS for Linux: Version 10.2.0.1.0 - Production
NLSRTL Version 10.2.0.1.0 - Production
SQL>
SQL> drop table test_iot;
Table dropped.
SQL>
SQL> create table test_iot(sq number primary key, txt varchar2(20))
  2  organization index;
Table created.
SQL>
SQL> insert into test_iot
  2  select rownum , to_char(rownum,'Fm000000')||'#'||dbms_random.random
  3  from dba_objects where rownum < 1001;
1000 rows created.
SQL>
SQL> exec dbms_stats.gather_table_stats(ownname => user, tabname => 'TEST_IOT', cascade => TRUE);
PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.
SQL>
SQL> explain plan for select * from test_iot;
Explained.
SQL> select * from table(dbms_xplan.display);
PLAN_TABLE_OUTPUT
Plan hash value: 2167072184
| Id  | Operation          | Name           | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time      |
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT     |                |  1000 | 21000 |     3   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   1 |  INDEX FAST FULL SCAN| SYS_IOT_TOP_52896 |  1000 | 21000 |     3   (0)| 00:00:01 |
8 rows selected.Since DBMS_ROWID cannot be used on a IOT, I'm not sure that a SQL query can prove that IOT guarantees physical ordering.