As far as the default sort order changing, there are plenty of ways for it to "break" without requiring an upgrade... just about anything which changes the execution plan could potentially do so. Adding an index, analyzing a table/schema, enabling parallel execution, changing the hash_area_size setting, etc. Take a look at Tom Kyte's site (http://asktom.oracle.com/) sometime. From what I've seen, he's been able to provide a counterexample *every single time* someone claimed that you can count on a particular sort order without use of an ORDER BY clause (even within a specific release). To put it bluntly, if you need data in a certain order then you *must* use an ORDER BY clause... failure to do so is most certainly an application bug. Upgrading the database seems a particularly effective method of exposing such bugs, but it's *never* been the only way. -- "I'm too sexy for my code." - Awk Sed Fred. -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l