Instability in DatabaseMetaDataTest.testGetBestRowIdentifier

Ingo reports instabilities in his platform tests of the 10.14.1.0 release candidate. He sees intermittent failures in DatabaseMetaDataTest.testGetBestRowIdentifier and then subsequent failures due to poor test case isolation in that test. The test case fails because DatabaseMetaData.getBestRowIdentifier() sometimes returns rows in a different order than the test expects.

The JDBC contract for that method does not specify an order for the returned rows. ORDER BY clauses appear on some but not all the catalog queries in metadata.properties which define the Derby result.

I see two ways to address this issue:

1) The test could be fixed so that it hand-sorts the returned rows in order to guarantee deterministic results.

2) ORDER BY clauses could be added to all the implicated metadata queries.