Ensure database operations maintain consistent behavior and ordering, especially in distributed systems. When working with data structures that affect schema representation or query results, prioritize deterministic ordering over performance optimizations to prevent schema mismatches and ensure reliable distributed operations.

Key considerations:

Example from the codebase:

// Before: Unordered map causing schema mismatches
absl::flat_hash_map<std::string_view, std::string_view> & map;

// After: Ordered map ensuring consistent schema representation
std::map<std::string_view, std::string_view> & map;

This prevents distributed systems from encountering schema mismatch exceptions due to inconsistent column ordering in operations like ColumnsDescription::toString() equality checks.