How to select DISTINCT rows without having the ORDER BY field selected

Question

So I have two tables students (PK sID) and mentors (PK pID). This query

SELECT s.pID
FROM students s JOIN mentors m ON s.pID = m.pID
WHERE m.tags LIKE \'%a%\         


        

Answer 1

You can't receive records in any predefined order if you don't use ORDER BY because then the DB engine decides in what order to return them.