>I use Order By a lot, since all my child records have a field named 'Item' that I used in the Order By clause to get the child records in the correct order when they are displayed in the grid. The user can then rearrange them un the UI, and that's where the Item field comes in.
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>You're saying and index will help that a little? The result set of child records is usually less than 10 records, so I've always assumed that ordering them by their 'Item' field was so easy/fast that there was no need to have an index in place.

Assuming that you have a traditional client exe install / server DB kind of app, scalability should *always* be better if you add an automatic indexing on the client side and skip the order by at the server. The _after Hooks of CA are verrry good for this kind of pattern.

If you are serving up web pages or are in a citrix/TS install pattern, order by might give you better scalability if the db-server is the less taxed part - hard to say and probably dependant on app, HW and usage patterns...

my 0.02 EUR

thomas