launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Edwin Grubbs <edwin.grubbs@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 7:40 PM, Michael Hudson
<michael.hudson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Thu, 7 Oct 2010 22:53:58 +0100, Graham Binns <graham@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> On Thursday, October 7, 2010, Michael Hudson
>> <michael.hudson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> > Back in the SQLObject days we had a hack that would add "ORDER BY
>> > random()" to any query that didn't have an ORDER BY already. Â Do we
>> > still have that? Â Although in this case it seems we had an ORDER BY,
>> > just not a sufficienly discriminating one. Â Could you add ", random()"
>> > to any query that does have an ORDER BY?
>> >
>>
>> Wouldn't that just break everything that relied on a specific ordering?
>
> Not if the ordering was already specific enough to be unambiguous, and
> if it's not specific enough to be unambiguous, it's a timebomb.
>
> Cheers,
> mwh


I think the confusion here is that Graham thinks you are suggesting replacing
"ORDER BY name" with "ORDER BY random()", but you are actually suggesting
that we append it, so "ORDER BY name" becomes "ORDER BY name, random()".

-Edwin