For clarity, what you are calling an ordered associative array is actually an ordered relation. The definition of "associative array" is functional (ie: one value per key), not relational (ie: potentially N values per key).
So we have:
<ordered_relation_foo>
<b>2</b>
<b>4</b>
<a>1</a>
<b>6</b>
<a>3</a>
<a>5</a>
</ordered_relation_foo>
becomes:
$ordered_relation_foo={
_meta_order=>[b,b,a,b,a,a],
b=>[2,4,6],
a=>[1,3,5]};
So now a query of this ordered relation becomes:
$ordered_relation_foo{a}
How does that compare to the query of your structure?
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