SQL - UPDATE TABLE and ORDER BY?

Question

So I have an unordered table movement that has columns timestamp,x,and y. I want to order by timestamp, and change and save the table to have the all rows ordered by timestamp.

I wanted to use UPDATE TABLE but I'm unsure on how the query would look... for example, I have this:

UPDATE movement 
SET ????? 
ORDER BY timestamp; 

I don't want to set anything, I just want to change the order of the table. I need to do this for another query that I'm going to write, but the fact is that this table is very large and I need to break up things in steps so that the performance isn't terrible later. So how would I do this? I found this SO post that addressed a similar question, but I was wondering if there was another way to do it rather than use another table, because as I said, this table is very large(millions of rows) and recopying the table would take a long time.

Answer 1

Tables don't inherently have an order; you don't have to update them into any particular order.

What you do is choose the order of what you SELECT from the table. Then it can be in any order you choose!

Example:

SELECT * FROM movement  
ORDER BY timestamp; 

But then somewhere else maybe you want to:

SELECT * FROM movement  
ORDER BY timestamp DESCENDING;