viewing the original order of entered records

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

Hi

I've the following problem:

I have a 2-column table with columns "person_id"(int4) and "phase"(text).

When I entered the following records in a chronological fashion: <1, "high
school">; <1, "childhood"> and <2, "university">;

I requested the following select-statement.

SELECT person_id, phase FROM life ORDER BY person_id

And found the tuple <1, "childhood"> before the tuple <1, "high school">.

I want to view the chronological order of my entries, but ordered by
person_id.

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.