Sorting on the server or on the client?

Question

I had a discussion with a colleague at work, it was about SQL queries and sorting. He has the opinion that you should let the server do any sorting before returning the rows

Answer 1

I prefer custom sorting on the client, however I also suggest that most SQL statements should have some reasonable ORDER BY clause by default. It causes very little impact on the database, but without it you could wind up with problems later. Often times without ever realizing it, a developer or user will begin to rely on some initial default sort order. If an ORDER BY clause wasn't specified, the data is only in that order by chance. At some later date an index could change or the data might be re-organized and the users will complain because the initial order of the data might have changed out from under them.