I have a simple join table with two id columns in SQL Server. Is there any way to select all rows in the exact order they were inserted?
If I try to make a SELECT *, even if I don't specify an ORDER BY clause, the rows are not being returned in the order they were inserted, but ordered by the first key column.
I know it's a weird question, but this table is very big and I need to check exactly when a strange behavior has begun, and unfortunately I don't have a timestamp column in my table.
UPDATE #1
I'll try to explain why I'm saying that the rows are not returned in 'natural' order when I SELECT * FROM table without an ORDER BY clause.
My table was something like this:
id1 id2
---------------
1 1
2 2
3 3
4 4
5 5
5 6
... and so on, with about 90.000+ rows
Now, I don't know why (probably a software bug inserted these rows), but my table have 4.5 million rows and looks like this:
id1 id2
---------------
1 1
1 35986
1 44775
1 60816
1 62998
1 67514
1 67517
1 67701
1 67837
...
1 75657 (100+ "strange" rows)
2 2
2 35986
2 44775
2 60816
2 62998
2 67514
2 67517
2 67701
2 67837
...
2 75657 (100+ "strange" rows)
Crazy, my table have now millions of rows. I have to take a look when this happened (when the rows where inserted) because I have to delete them, but I can't just delete using *WHERE id2 IN (strange_ids)* because there are "right" id1 columns that belongs to these id2 columns, and I can't delete them, so I'm trying to see when exactly these rows were inserted to delete them.
When I SELECT * FROM table, it returns me ordered by id1, like the above table, and the rows were not inserted in this order in my table. I think my table is not corrupted because is the se