I think I recall when this feature was discussed and implemented. If it's what I'm thinking of, this concern was carefully considered: If a subquery in the

I think I recall when this feature was discussed and implemented. If it's what I'm thinking of, this concern was carefully considered: If a subquery in the FROM clause has an ORDER BY, that ORDER BY is omitted if all of the following conditions are also true: 1. There is no LIMIT clause in the subquery 2. The subquery was not one of the virtual subqueries added internally by SQLite for window-function processing 3. The subquery is not part of the FROM clause in an UPDATE-FROM statement 4. The outer query does not use any aggregate functions other than the built-in count(), min(), and/or max() functions. 5. Either the outer query has its own ORDER BY clause or else the subquery is one term of a join. from https://sqlite.org/forum/forumpost/878ca7a9be0862af?t=h https://sqlite.org/forum/forumpost/878ca7a9be0862af?t=h