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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-01T05:56:54+00:00

It doesn’t matter what I put in the ORDER BY clause, the order of

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It doesn’t matter what I put in the ORDER BY clause, the order of the result set doesn’t change.

WITH Results AS (
    SELECT DISTINCT 
        MessageThreadUsers.threadFK, 
        MessageThreads.threadDate, 
        Messages.MessageBody, 
        Messages.senderFK,
        Users.userFullName AS senderFullName, 
        ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY MessageThreads.threadDate DESC) AS RowNumber

    FROM MessageThreadUsers
        JOIN MessageThreads ON MessageThreadUsers.threadFK = MessageThreads.threadID
        JOIN Messages ON MessageThreads.threadDate = Messages.messageDate
        JOIN Users ON Messages.senderFK = Users.userID

    WHERE userFK = 'usr_developer'
) 
SELECT * FROM Results WHERE RowNumber BETWEEN 1 AND 10
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    ORDER BY only controls the order of returned rows when it is applied to the outermost SELECT statement.

    This may work better:

    WITH Results AS (
    SELECT DISTINCT 
        MessageThreadUsers.threadFK, 
        MessageThreads.threadDate, 
        Messages.MessageBody, 
        Messages.senderFK,
        Users.userFullName AS senderFullName, 
        ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY MessageThreads.threadDate DESC) AS RowNumber

    FROM MessageThreadUsers
        JOIN MessageThreads ON MessageThreadUsers.threadFK = MessageThreads.threadID
        JOIN Messages ON MessageThreads.threadDate = Messages.messageDate
        JOIN Users ON Messages.senderFK = Users.userID

    WHERE userFK = 'usr_developer'
) 
SELECT * FROM Results WHERE RowNumber BETWEEN 1 AND 10
ORDER BY RowNumber
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