I'm not sure I'd call that a footgun -- it's a fundamental property of relational algebra that relations are unordered. That said, it's not universally true th

I'm not sure I'd call that a footgun -- it's a fundamental property of relational algebra that relations are unordered. That said, it's not universally true that subquery ordering is not propagated to the final result; in the absence of an ORDER BY clause, the query engine will return the results in whatever order is most convenient for execution. For example, this query: select *, rank() over (partition by lastname order by firstname) from employees; will definitely return a result set ordered by lastname,firstname even though it's not explicitly specified (tested on MS' azure sql database).