ORDER BY: Putting Rows in Order

Sorting

So far, rows have come back in the order they were inserted. Never rely on that: without an explicit order, the database is free to return rows however it likes. When order matters, and it usually does (a newest-first feed, a cheapest-first shop page, a leaderboard: each is just a sorted query), say so with ORDER BY:

SELECT title, rating FROM movies ORDER BY rating DESC;

• DESC means descending (biggest first).
• ASC means ascending (smallest first) and is the default, so ORDER BY year sorts oldest first.
• Text columns sort alphabetically.

ORDER BY goes after the WHERE clause if you have one: SELECT ... FROM ... WHERE ... ORDER BY ....

Sorting by more than one column

List several columns and the database uses the second as a tie-breaker for the first, the third for the second, and so on:

SELECT genre, rating, title FROM movies
ORDER BY genre, rating DESC;

Rows are grouped alphabetically by genre first. Inside each genre, the higher rating comes first. Each column gets its own ASC/DESC.