guarantee order of table valued function results

Question

PREMISE: The application code cannot be changed. The conditions are very specific. I am looking for something off the books, a last resort workaround if you

Answer 1

For an inline TVF nothing will really work. Not only that, the inline TVF may even return more rows than you believe it should, and the rows will be trimmed after the TVF executed (basically a predicate in the TVF definition can be pulled out of the TVF and moved somewhere else in the query tree). See T-SQL functions do no imply a certain order of execution for an example of this happening.

Converting the inline TVF to a multi statement one will introduce some procedural order, since the statements cannot be executed out of order, but the TVF result may be re-ordered, sorted, split, spooled, basically mangled by the optimizer generated plan and in the end break your assumption about output order. I'm afraid if you must have a certain order of execution, cursors are your best friend.