Order By SQL | SQL Order By Clause of The SQL Statement With Example

Summary: In this article, you will learn ORDER BY SQL and how to use the Order By Clause of The SQL Statement With Example to sort the result and set a query by one or more columns.

The ORDER BY SQL Keyword

  • The ORDER BY SQL keyword is used for the purpose of sorting the result-set in ascending or descending order to one or more columns.
  • The ORDER BY SQL keyword generally sorts the records in ascending order by default. When you want to sort the records in descending order, then you need to use the DESC keyword and the keyword ASC to sort in ascending order.

ORDER BY Syntax

SELECT column1, column2, …
FROM table_name
ORDER BY column1, column2, … ASC|DESC;
.
Note: ASC: The keyword ASC will be used to sort the records in ascending order.
DESC: The keyword DESC will be used to sort the records in descending order

Demo Database for ORDER BY SQL

ClientsID ClientsName ClientsAge Address City PostalCode Country
11 Aaron Brayden 31 Berguvsvägen Lulea 345212 Sweden
12 Coinneach Dev 38 Mataderos 2312 México D.F. 5023 Mexico
13 Devin Diego 40 140 Hanover Sq. London 18909 UK
14 Ethan Driss 43 Avda. de la Constitución 231 México D.F. 5021 Mexico
15 Alfreds Futterkiste 35 Obere Str. 57 Berlin 12209 Germany

1. ORDER BY Example

The given below following SQL statement selects all Clients from the “Clients” table, sorted by the “City” column:


ORDER BY SQL Example

2. SQL ORDER BY Ascending Sort according to one column:

To sort the records in ascending order in SQL, we can use the keywords ASC.


Ascending Sort

3. SQL ORDER BY Descending Sort according to one column:

To sort the records in descending order in SQL, we can use the keywords DESC.


Descending Sort

4. Sort according to multiple columns:

Here, we will use the ORDER BY to sort in ascending or descending order then you can use the keywords ASC or DESC respectively. To sort records according to multiple columns, separate the names of columns by the (,) operator.


Ascending Sort

5. ORDER BY Several Columns Example

The following SQL statement selects all clients from the “Clients” table, sorted by the “Country” and the “ClientsName” column. It implies that it orders by Country, but if some rows have the same Country, it orders them by ClientsName:


Ascending Sort ORDER BY Several Columns

.
Note: ASC is the default value for the ORDER BY SQL keyword. So, if we do not mention anything after the column name in the ORDER BY clause, generally the resulting output will be sorted the records in ascending order by default.
There are Six Operations are used to Order: SELECT, FROM, WHERE, GROUP BY, HAVING, and ORDER BY

6. Sorting Results by the relative position

To sort by relative position in the result set then you can also use the ORDER BY clause. whereas the first field in the result set is 1, & the second field is 2, and so on.
In this example, we have a table called clients with the following data:


Ascending Sort

Conclusion:

In this article, you have learned how to sorted the records in ascending or descending order with the help of the ORDER BY clause and with the different types of examples. I hope you will enjoy it!