Organizing Data

When you retrieve data from the database, the rows are in an order selected by the database management system. If you want the data sorted in a particular order, use the ORDER BY clause. The ORDER BY clause must be the last clause in a SELECT statement.

How It's Done

You can order an employee list by entering:

select emp_id, emp_lname
       from employee
       order by emp_lname;

The result looks like this:

EMP_ID EMP_LNAME ------ --------- 2180 Albertini 1765 Alexander 2461 Anderson 1003 Baldwin 2466 Bennett 4321 Bradley 3082 Brooks 2096 Carlson 2145 Catlin 4008 Clark 4027 Courtney 3433 Crane 3841 Cromwell 4773 Dexter 3769 Donelson 5103 Ferguson 3778 Ferndale 5008 Fordman 1034 Gallway 2894 Griffin 4703 Halloran 2246 Hamel 2598 Jacobs 2004 Johnson 3294 Johnson 3199 Loren 3767 Lowe 2448 Lynn 4660 MacGregor 1234 Mills 3704 Moore 3764 Park 2010 Parker 4358 Robinson 4002 Roy 3288 Sampson 2209 Smith 3341 Smith 2299 Spade 3449 Taylor 4001 Thompson 2437 Thompson 4456 Thompson 2781 Thurston 2898 Umidy 3222 Voltmer 3338 White 4962 White 2106 Widman 2424 Wilder 3991 Wilkins 3411 Williams 5090 Wills 3118 Wooding 2174 Zander 55 rows processed

You can specify either ascending (ASC) or descending (DESC) order. The default order is ascending.

If you sort on a column that contains null values, the null values are grouped together.