Sorting Results

In many real-world scenarios, such as displaying a product catalog or listing customer orders, we want our results to appear in a clear, logical order. Imagine we have a large set of products with varying prices, stock, and names. If we display them randomly, it would be hard to find the most expensive item, the cheapest product, or to simply scan through them in alphabetical order. By sorting our query results, we can quickly bring structure to what might otherwise be a confusing set of data.

Sorting is an essential feature of SQL, enabling us to organize data in a meaningful way. This makes it easier to analyze trends and draw insights.

Let's dive into the concept of sorting data in SQL. We'll keep our focus to:

• Understand how to use the ORDER BY clause to sort results by one or more columns.

• Learn to organize data by sorting across multiple columns.

• Recognize the default sorting order and how to specify both ascending and descending orders.

Sorting query results with ORDER BY

Sorting results in SQL helps us arrange the output of our queries in a meaningful sequence. This might mean sorting products by price from the lowest to the highest, sorting customers by their names alphabetically, or ordering orders by their date. Sorting makes it easier to analyze data, compare values, and present information in a user-friendly way.

The ORDER BY clause is placed at the end of our SELECT statement. It allows us to pick one or more columns to determine the sequence of rows in our results. By default, ORDER BY arranges results in ascending order (ASC), which means it works as follows:

• For numeric columns, the numbers are ...