SQL ORDER BY Keyword

ORDER BY keyword is used to sort the result set.

SQL ORDER BY Keyword

ORDER BY keyword is used to sort the result set in accordance with a column or multiple columns.

ORDER BY keywords default to sort records in ascending order. If you need to sort the records in descending order, you can use the DESC keyword.

SQL ORDER BY Syntax

The demo database

In this tutorial, we will use w3big sample database.

The following is a selected "Websites" table data:

+----+--------------+---------------------------+-------+---------+
| id | name         | url                       | alexa | country |
+----+--------------+---------------------------+-------+---------+
| 1  | Google       | https://www.google.cm/    | 1     | USA     |
| 2  | 淘宝          | https://www.taobao.com/   | 13    | CN      |
| 3  | 本教程      | http://www.w3big.com/    | 4689  | CN      |
| 4  | 微博          | http://weibo.com/         | 20    | CN      |
| 5  | Facebook     | https://www.facebook.com/ | 3     | USA     |
+----+--------------+---------------------------+-------+---------+

ORDER BY instance

The following SQL statement to select all the sites from the "Websites" list and sorted by "alexa" column:

Examples

SELECT * FROM Websites ORDER BY alexa;

Execution output:

ORDER BY DESC examples

The following SQL statement to select all the sites from the "Websites" list and follow "alexa" column in descending order:

Examples

SELECT * FROM Websites ORDER BY alexa DESC;

Execution output:

ORDER BY multiple columns

The following SQL statement to select all the sites from the "Websites" list and follow the "country" and "alexa" column sort:

Examples

SELECT * FROM Websites ORDER BY country, alexa;

Execution output: