Is order by clause allowed in a subquery

Question

Is there any reason why or why not you should do an 'order by' in a subquery?

Answer 1

Yes: It should not be done, because it does not make sense conceptually.

The subquery will be used in some outer query (otherwise it would be pointless), and that outer query will have to do ordering anyway, so there's no point ordering the subquery.

This is because query results in SQL will come in no particular order, unless you use an explicit ORDER. So even if you used ORDER in the subquery, you have no guarantee that this will affect the order of the results from the outer query; so it's pointless.

It may of course make a difference in some specific RDBMS because of its implementation, but that will be implementation-specific, and not something you should rely on.

Edit: Of course, if you use TOP or LIMIT in the subquery, you will need to use ORDER. But that's not standard SQL anyway...

Answer 2

No ORDER BY is valid in a subquery when you are interested in a subset of the overall data, hence you always need a TOP (SQL Server). There's no point having an ORDER BY without TOP in a subquery because the overall ordering of the results is handled by the outer query.