ORDER BY

Use the ORDER BY clause to order the results that are returned from a SELECT statement. You can specify just a column or use any expression with functions. If you are using the GROUP BY clause, you can use grouping functions in ORDER BY. Ordering is done after grouping.

You can use multiple ordering expressions, separated by commas. Rows will be sorted by the first expression, then by the second expression if they have the same value for the first, and so on.

You can use the keywords ASC and DESC after each ordering expression to force that ordering to be ascending or descending, respectively. Ordering is ascending by default.

You can also use a single integer as the ordering expression. If you use an integer n, the results will be ordered by the nth column in the select expression.

When string values are compared, they are compared as if by the STRCMP function. STRCMP ignores trailing whitespace and may normalize characters and ignore case, depending on the collation in use.

See Also

• Why is ORDER BY in a FROM subquery ignored?
• SELECT
• Joins and Subqueries
• LIMIT
• GROUP BY
• Common Table Expressions
• SELECT WITH ROLLUP
• SELECT INTO OUTFILE
• SELECT INTO DUMPFILE
• FOR UPDATE
• LOCK IN SHARE MODE
• Optimizer Hints