Is ORDER BY honoured in SQL Server views?

Question

In this answer to What are the downsides of using SqlServer Views?, hyprsleepy suggests the ORDER BY clause is not honoured in views in SQL Server.

Could anyone explain why this is the case?

Edit: Thanks for the answers, but I'm not sure thats the issue. I know you cant add an Order By Clause to a view and I dont have a problem with that, you just add it to the SELECT statement when calling the view, but my impression from the other question was that using an Order By Clause in a SELECT statement on a view will not give the correct results every time.

Answer 1

SQL Server developers assume that any set operation may change the order of the records so there is no point to use ORDER BY in the intermediate set definitions and it only makes sense in the final statements.

The views may be used in joins or other operations which invalidates their orders.

Since you cannot use the view by itself, i. e. you don't write vMyView, you rather write SELECT * FROM vMyView, despite the fact that the view is a SELECT per se, you can (and should) append the ORDER BY clause to the SELECT statement as well if you need an order.

This is quite a sane assumption and in fact it makes the code more clear.

Answer 2

Take a look at Create a sorted view in SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008

There is a way to do it but it is not supported, just issue an order by when selecting from the view