It is a worst practice when it comes to production class code.

But it sure is a power users tool and a shortcut for ad hoc queries. When I am working on a problem that requires me to run a bunch of SELECT statements, I am not going to type the column names in ORDER BY clause. I'll simply use ordinal numbers.

Here's another reason why, we shouldn't use ordinal position in production code:

SELECT id, name

FROM sysobjects

ORDER BY 1.2

Notice the dot between 1 and 2. It's a typo, it should actually be a comma. But the statement still works, except that the output is not sorted as you'd expect, there by introducing a bug.

And no, there are no performance differences.

HTH,

Vyas

http://vyaskn.tripod.com/

Edited by - vyaskn on 10/01/2002 07:03:08 AM