Home/

...

/

Sorting Data

Sorting Data

Learn how to sort using the ORDER BY clause.

Revisiting report 1

Let’s revisit the part where we created a report listing salespersons. Here is what we did:

MySQL
SELECT DISTINCT SalesPerson
FROM SalesData;

Although we had successfully generated the report, we overlooked the requirement that the names of the salespersons in the sample report should be sorted in ascending order. 

Report 1: List of salespersons
Report 1: List of salespersons

To that end, SQL provides a mechanism to arrange the outcomes in either ascending or descending order.

Sorted in descending order
Sorted in descending order

The structure of such a query is outlined below:

SELECT column1, column2, ...
FROM table_name
ORDER BY column1, column2, ... ASC|DESC;
...