I was not proposing that the WHERE and the ORDER BY were cooperating in some way to get the 3 values of the result. Those 3 values match the 3 values of the supplied answer solely as a result of the WHERE clause. I was trying, poorly, to point out that the exact order of those values can only be guaranteed to match the order of the supplied answer if we have the ORDER BY clause. An earlier post had suggested that the ORDER BY was unnecessary, I disagreed. 🙂