Re: Beginning and end of table

[Peter Brawley]

> I have three different "ORDERS" for data implemented
> through ALTER TABLE mytable ORDER BY myfield ASC etc.

Dreadfully wrong practice. Grotesquely inefficient. Physical row order survives only until the next update or Insert. A basic rule of relational databases is that row order presentation is independent of physical storage. The physical ordering kludge you are using is for occasional use when other optimisation methods fail.

To order row display, use queries with Order By clauses, optimise them correctly for performance, use Where or Limit clauses to paginate, and write code to keep track of which row the user is in her browsing.