Last updated Nov 17, 2024

The ORDER BY clause is used to sort the result set of a query by one or more columns. It can sort the data in ascending or descending order. By default, it sorts in ascending order.

ORDER BY must come after the WHERE clause. This makes sense if we think about it, we do not want to sort the rows until we’ve already filtered out the ones we don’t want.

Using the Employees table from the previous example:

We can sort the results by columns such as age with:

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SELECT * FROM Employees
ORDER BY Age;

If we instead wrote:

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SELECT * FROM Employees
ORDER BY Age DESC;

We would get the same list but sorted from the highest to lowest age.

It is also possible to ORDER BY multiple columns:

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SELECT * FROM Employees
ORDER BY Department, Age;

In this ordered list, employees are sorted by their departments (‘Finance’, ‘HR’, ‘IT’, and ‘Marketing’), and within each department, they are sorted by their age from youngest to oldest.

7. Write a query to select all customers and order them alphabetically by the customer name.

8. Write a query to select all customers and order them by their Ids from highest to lowest.

• SQL - W2 Select and Filter Data - Introduction
• SQL - W2 Select and Filter Data - Creating a Database
• SQL - W2 Select and Filter Data - Running Scripts
• SQL - W2 Select and Filter Data - SELECT Statement
• SQL - W2 Select and Filter Data - WHERE Clause and Comparison Operators
• SQL - W2 Select and Filter Data - Logical Operators
• SQL - W2 Select and Filter Data - ORDER BY
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• SQL - W2 Select and Filter Data - Note on Semicolons
• SQL - W2 Select and Filter Data - Practice Assignment