SQL Order By

The SQL Order By allows you to sort your results when you run a SQL Query.

Let’s look at an example:

select * from employee order by employee_name; 

This will sort by the employee_name column.

Here are the results:

If you want to change the sort from Ascending (which is the default) to Descending, you would write your query as follows.

select * from employee order by employee_name desc; 

With the following results:

You can also sort by more than one column.

select * from employee order by job asc,employee_name desc; 

Notice how job and employee_name columns are both sorted.

And the last trick is that you can use the column number.  In this case I will sort by the 3rd column (job) then the 2nd column (employee_name).

select * from employee order by 3 asc,2 asc; 

Notice that I changed the employee_name column to sort ascending.

And that’s it for the SQL Order By clause.

Leave any comments or questions below.