Thread: viewing the original order of entered records

On Tue, 10 Jun 2003, Sven Van Acker wrote:

> Hi
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> I've the following problem:
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> I have a 2-column table with columns "person_id"(int4) and "phase"(text).
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> When I entered the following records in a chronological fashion: <1, "high
> school">; <1, "childhood"> and <2, "university">;
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> I requested the following select-statement.
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> SELECT person_id, phase FROM life ORDER BY person_id
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> And found the tuple <1, "childhood"> before the tuple <1, "high school">.
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> I want to view the chronological order of my entries, but ordered by
> person_id.
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> Is this possible in postgresql?

Yes, just make sure and store a date/time stamp when you insert the
records.  You can use a before trigger to update a time stamp field on
every update of the row.

Note that without a field to "order by" neither postgresql nor any other
database guarantees any particular return order.