Re^3: Strategy for randomizing large files via sysseek

How random do you need them to be?
Oracle will return the rows in physical order (which may match input order if you haven't done a lot of page splits during the load) but not in sorted order unless you specifically say "Order By" in the query.

How important is the randomness?
You could approach some level of randomness by repeatedly catting the files together and then splitting them at different points and catting them together again... kind of like shuffling cards...

Comment on Re^3: Strategy for randomizing large files via sysseek

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Re^4: Strategy for randomizing large files via sysseek by Anonymous Monk on Sep 09, 2004 at 15:08 UTC
(OP) They need to be pretty random. I imagine a database would pretty much keep them in the same order as how they loaded them - i.e. the existing order. So a lack of ORDER BY would not really help too much.	[reply]