Hey, This came up today on twitter as a claimed POLA violation: postgres=# select random(), random() order by random(); random | random ---------------------+--------------------- 0.08176638503720679 | 0.08176638503720679 (1 row) Which was explained long ago by Tom as: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/9570.1193941378%40sss.pgh.pa.us The parser makes it behave equivalent to: SELECT random() AS foo ORDER BY foo; Which apparently extends to any column, even aliased ones, that use the same expression: postgres=# select random() as foo, random() as foo2 order by foo; foo | foo2 --------------------+-------------------- 0.7334292196943459 | 0.7334292196943459 (1 row) The documentation does say: "A query using a volatile function will re-evaluate the function at every row where its value is needed." https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/xfunc-volatility.html That sentence is insufficient to explain why, without the order by, the system chooses to evaluate random() twice, while with order by it does so only once. I propose extending the existing ORDER BY paragraph in the SELECT Command Reference as follows: "A limitation of this feature is that an ORDER BY clause applying to the result of a UNION, INTERSECT, or EXCEPT clause can only specify an output column name or number, not an expression." Add: A side-effect of this feature is that ORDER BY expressions containing volatile functions will execute the volatile function only once for the entire row; thus any column expressions using the same function will reuse the same function result. By way of example, note the output differences for the following two queries: postgres=# select random() as foo, random()*1 as foo2 from generate_series(1,2) order by foo; foo | foo2 --------------------+-------------------- 0.2631492904302788 | 0.2631492904302788 0.9019166692448664 | 0.9019166692448664 (2 rows) postgres=# select random() as foo, random() as foo2 from generate_series(1,2); foo | foo2 --------------------+-------------------- 0.7763978178239725 | 0.3569212477832773 0.7360531822096732 | 0.7028952103643864 (2 rows) David J.