Summary: In this chapter, we will learn how to sort a result set using MySQL ORDER BY clause.

The MySQL ORDER BY Keyword

Introduction to MySQL ORDER BY clause

When we use the SELECT statement to query data from a table, the result set is not sorted in any orders. The ORDER BY keyword is used to sort the result-set by one or more columns.

MySQL ORDER BY Syntax:

SELECT
  column_name, column_name
FROM
  table_name
ORDER BY
  column_name ASC|DESC, column_name ASC|DESC;

MySQL ORDER BY examples

We will continue with the employees table data in the sample database as shown in the picture below.

The following query selects employees data from the employees table and sorts it based on last name in ascending order.

SELECT
  employeeid, firstName, lastName, jobtitle
FROM
  employees
ORDER BY
  lastName;

In above Query we can see ORDER BY keyword sorts the records in ascending order by default. If we want to sort the contacts by last name in descending order, we need to specify the DESC in the ORDER BY clause as the following query:

SELECT
  employeeid, firstName, lastName, jobtitle
FROM
  employees
ORDER BY
  lastName DESC;

We can sort multiple columns also using ORDER BY clause with ASC and DESC order. for example we want to sort the employees data by last name in descending order and first name in ascending order, we need to specify both  DESC and ASC in the corresponding column as follows:

SELECT
  employeeid, firstName, lastName, jobtitle
FROM
  employees
ORDER BY
  firstname ASC,
  lastName DESC;

In the query above, the ORDER BY  clause sorts the result set by the first name in ascending order first and then sorts the sorted result set by the last name in descending order to produce the final result set.

In this chapter, we’ve learnt how to sort a result set by using the MySQL ORDER BY clause.