How To Use SQL Order By Descending With Several Example?

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

SQL Order By Descending Keyword

The SQL Server ORDER BY clause can be used to sort the data without specifying the ASC or DESC value. When this attribute is omitted from the ORDER BY SQL clause, the sort order is defaulted to ascending order or ASC. but when you want to sort records to descending order then you need to use DESC.

Syntax:

The SQL ORDER BY Descending syntax given as below:

SELECT expressions
FROM tables
[WHERE conditions] ORDER BY expression DESC;

Here,

  • expressions:– expressions defined here the column(s) you want to retrieve. If you want to retrieve all the columns just generally use * in the place of expressions.
  • tables:– one or over one table from wherever you wish to retrieve data.
  • WHERE conditions:– It is optional. Basically, it is used to mention some conditions while selecting data. just in case you’re not using the WHERE clause, all the rows available will be selected.
  • ORDER BY:– This keyword is used to sort the result set. If you wish to kind on over one column, you need to provide them in a comma-separated.
  • DESC:– When using the DESC keyword, then it sorts the result set in descending order. this is often the default behavior if no modifier is mentioned.
.

Note: The SQL Server (Transact-SQL) ORDER BY keyword is used to sort the records in your result set. The SQL ORDER BY clause can only be used in SELECT statements.

If within the SQL statements ASC (ascending order) or DESC (descending order) modifier isn’t provided within the ORDER BY SQL keyword, then the results are going to be sorted by expression in ASC or ascending order. this suggests that it’s equivalent to ORDER BY expression ASC.

Demo Database Table

Let’s Consider an Students table with the following data.

StudentsID Name Age course Fees
1 Alfreds Futterkiste 18 12th 5200
2 Blauer See Delikatessen 21 B.Tech 34000
3 Ana Trujillo 26 MBA 23000
4 Hanna Moos 24 BA 12000
5 Victoria Ashworth 28 Data Science 41000
6 Elizabeth Lincoln 27 B.Tech 34000
7 Martín Sommer 26 LLB 23000
8 Elizabeth Brown 22 B.Com 21000
9 Pedro Afonso 24 MBA 25000
10 Yang Wang 26 Data Science 45000
11 Francisco Chang 28 LLB 25000
12 Janine Labrune 30 CA 22000
13 Sven Ottlieb 27 B.Com 21000
14 Roland Mendel 26 CA 23000
15 Lino Rodriguez 25 B.Tech 32000

Example:-1

The given below SQL statement sorts the result in Decending order by “NAME”.


sql order by descending

Example:-2

The given below SQL statement sorts the result in Desending order by “course”.


descending order by sql

Example:-3

In this SQL statement, When we sort the result set in descending order, then we need to use the DESC attribute in your ORDER BY Keyword.

OUTPUT: This SQL Server ORDER BY Descending example would return all records sorted by the Name field in descending order.