Oracle SQL order by in subquery problems!

Question

I am trying to run a subquery in Oracle SQL and it will not let me order the subquery columns. Ordering the subquery is important as Oracle seems to choose at will which of

Answer 1

Both dcw and Dems have provided appropriate alternative queries. I just wanted to toss in an explanation of why your query isn't behaving the way you expected it to.

If you have a query that includes a ROWNUM and an ORDER BY, Oracle applies the ROWNUM first and then the ORDER BY. So the query

SELECT *
  FROM emp
 WHERE rownum <= 5
 ORDER BY empno

gets an arbitrary 5 rows from the EMP table and sorts them-- almost certainly not what was intended. If you want to get the "first N" rows using ROWNUM, you would need to nest the query. This query

SELECT *
  FROM (SELECT *
          FROM emp
         ORDER BY empno)
 WHERE rownum <= 5

sorts the rows in the EMP table and returns the first 5.