How to join two tables together with same number of rows by their order

Question

I am using SQL2000 and I would like to join two table together based on their positions

For example consider the following 2 tables:

table1
-------
name
-         


        

Answer 1

This is NOT possible, since there's absolutely no guarantee regarding the order in which the rows will be selected.

There are a number of ways to achieve what you want (see other answers) provided you're lucky regarding the sorting order, but none will work if you aren't, and you shouldn't rely on such queries.

Being forced to do this kind of queries strongly smells of a bad database design.