Primary Key Sorting

Question

Is a table intrinsically sorted by it\'s primary key? If I have a table with the primary key on a BigInt identity column can I trust that queries will always return the dat

Answer 1

You must apply the ORDER BY to guarantee an order. If you are noticing a performance difference than it is likely your data was not sorted without the ORDER BY in place — otherwise SQL-Server must be behaving badly since it is not realizing the data is already sorted. Adding the ORDER BY on already sorted data should not incur a performance penalty since the RDBMS should be smart enough to realize the order of the data.