Order by
An ORDER BY clause in
CASE expressions. The expressions are evaluated and the results are used for the sorting, i.e., the values stored in the column or the results of the function call.
ORDER BY is the only way to sort the rows in the result set. Without this clause, the relational
ORDER BY ORDER OF ... (not standardized in SQL:2003The SQL standard's core functionality does not explicitly define a default sort order for Nulls. With the SQL:2003 extension T611, "Elementary OLAP operations", nulls can be sorted before or after all data values by using the NULLS FIRST or NULLS LAST clauses of the ORDER BY list, respectively. Not all DBMS vendors implement this functionality, however. Vendors who do not implement this functionality may specify different treatments for Null sorting in the DBMS.[1]
Structure ORDER BY ... DESC will order in descending order, otherwise ascending order is used. (The latter may be specified explicitly using ASC.)
Examples
SELECT * FROM Employees
ORDER BY LastName, FirstName
This sorts by the LastName column, then by the FirstName column if LastName matches.
References
- ^ "NULL Handling in SQLite Versus Other Database Engines". Retrieved January 25, 2009.
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