Confluence uses a version of HSQLDB that sometimes returns results in wrong order

I was trying to diagnose a very strange bug in the Activity Stream plugin on my development build, where calling PageManager.getPreviousVersion(page) was actually returning the first version of the page, rather than the one immediately preceding the version that I passed in.

I traced it down to a bug in hsqldb: it was ignoring the "desc" in "order by contentent0_.VERSION desc" clause that Hibernate was generating.

I found this in the HSQLDB tracker, which says it is fixed in 1.8.0.2 (Confluence currently includes 1.8.0.1):
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1240634&group_id=23316&atid=378131

I've confirmed that the bug is fixed if I have the plugin's test harness use hsqldb-1.8.0.7 instead (1.8.0.8 isn't in the Maven repository currently).