SQL ORDER BY CLAUSE

The SQL ORDER BY clause comes in handy when you want to sort your SQL result sets by some column(s). For example if you want to select all the persons from the already familiar Company table and order the result by date of birth, you will use the following statement:

SELECT * FROM Company ORDER BY DOB

The result of the above SQL expression will be the following:

FirstName	LastName	Email	DOB	Phone
Scott	Armstrong	Armstrong.yahoo.com	2/4/1968	887-676-2321
Adam	Red	red@himail.com	4/4/1978	792 343-2422
Santo	Harry	Harry@livingin.org	5/24/1978	416 323-3232
Jackson	Jimmy	Jimmy@supermail.co.uk	20/10/1980	416 323-8888

As you can see the rows are sorted in ascending order by the DOB column, but what if you want to sort them in descending order? To do that you will have to add the DESC SQL keyword after your SQL ORDER BY clause:

 SELECT * FROM Company ORDER BY DOB DESC

If you don't specify how to order your rows, alphabetically or reverse, than the result set is ordered alphabetically, hence the following to SQL expressions produce the same result:

SELECT * FROM Company ORDER BY DOB

SELECT * FROM Company ORDER BY DOB ASC

You can sort your result set by more than one column by specifying those columns in the SQL ORDER BY list.

The following SQL expression will order by DOB and LastName:

SELECT * FROM Company  ORDER BY DOB, LastName

MORE BASIC SQL COMMANDS