As well as the SQL Select ... Order By ... solution, if yoiu wanted to index your child table on the parent, pemanently (as in persistant reln.), then your ORDERS table could have a key:

CUST_ID + DTOT( ORDER_DATE)                    && assuming CUST_ID is char, or
STR( CUST_ID, n_sig_figs) + DTOT( ORDER_DATE)  && If CUST_ID numeric

HTH

Terry

>Is there a way to control the sort order of the child records in a relationship or a SQL SELECT statement? This seems rather basic but not very easy unless I'm missing something. Say you have a CUSTOMERS table and an ORDERS table. You do a SQL SELECT and you want the orders to appear by date. The orders table must be indexed on customer ID for the relation to work which seems to prevent the date sort. Any attempt to order by date breaks the relation.
>
>There must be a way to do this.
>Help please.