Re: viewing the original (chrnological) order of entered

No, at least not as you expect it. SQL returns the found records in
random order except for the explicit "order by" clause. So if you want a
chronological order, you have to supply some ordering fields to the
order by clause. This could be achieved easily by normalizing your
table, i.e. create a table like:
create table ages (
    age_id smallint primary key,
    sort_order smallint,
    age_name varchar(100)
);
insert into ages values (1, 10, 'childhood');
insert into ages values (2, 20, 'high school');
insert into ages values (3, 30, 'univesrity');

NOTE: leave gaps in the sort order to accommodate for later insertions.

Then in the original table replace the names with age_id, and use a join
on the 2 tables, sorting by original_table.person_id, ages.sort_order.

HTH,
Csaba.


On Tue, 2003-06-10 at 11:50, Sven Van Acker wrote:
> Hi
>
>
>
> I've the following problem:
>
>
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> I have a 2-column table with columns "person_id"(int4) and "phase"(text).
>
>
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> When I entered the following records in a chronological fashion: <1, "high
> school">; <1, "childhood"> and <2, "university">;
>
>
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>
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> I requested the following select-statement.
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> SELECT person_id, phase FROM life ORDER BY person_id
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>
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> And found the tuple <1, "childhood"> before the tuple <1, "high school">.
>
>
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> I want to view the chronological order of my entries, but ordered by
> person_id.
>
> Is this possible in postgresql?
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>
>