What are the alternatives for an ORDER BY clause in a View? This question just had to be in this site :)

ORDER BY is forbidden to use in a view, as I understood because of the possibility for multiple order by's when using this view.

I know that there are ways of bypassing this limitation, for example TOP 99.999999 PERCENT, but I would like to know what is the best practice, not how to hack it.

So, if I want to create views in my database for personal use, meaning I want to connect to the database and just see the data fixed and sorted, how should I do it if I can't order a view?

Currently in my SQL Server DB I have views with the TOP hack, and I'm using them a lot, but it feels wrong.
Only the outermost ORDER BY will guarantee order


Any intermediate or internal ORDER BY is ignored.This includes ORDER BY in a view
There is no implied order in any table
There is no implied order from any index (clustered or not) on that table


Links


"Sorting Rows with ORDER BY" (MSDN)



  ORDER BY guarantees a sorted result only for the outermost SELECT statement of a query. For example, consider the following view definition: (and example follow that matches this question)