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Oh absolutely. I thought about saying that, and just ran out of energy before posting the article this morning.

The reason I used this particular SQL statement as an example is that ActiveRecord (a Ruby ORM) generates it from a fairly simple, common Ruby expression. I suppose ActiveRecord could be improved to drop the sort when you know there's one one possible match.

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Unless "name" is unique, there could be multiple matches. Asking for the "first" demands an ordering.

Perhaps (a) the user doesn't care what ordering is used, and/or (b) (such as in your example in the preceding post) hasn't specified an order (and apparently PK ordering is defaulted to PK - a model option?). It would be error-prone for ORM to take (b) as implying (a).

Yes, good point. Rails has a lot of conventions like this - that "first" implies ordering by primary key (by default). I just imagine that most Rails developers don't think about sorting and its implications when they ask for the first record.

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