Benefits Of Using SQL Ordinal Position Notation?

Question

Background Information

Ordinal position notation, AKA ordinals, is column shorthand based on the column order in the list of columns in the SELECT cla

Answer 1

I tend to use in-line views now:

select col_a, count(*) from
  (select case ...... end col_a from ...)
group by col_a
order by col_a;

But in the days before they were valid syntax, it did help retyping the full text of the column. With tricky functions you had the potential for discrepancies between the value in the SELECT and ORDER BY such as

select ltrim(col_name,'0123456789')
from table
order by ltrim(col_name,'123456789')

The '0' in the SELECT means that you are not ordering by what you select.