It is assumed that you have gone through the previous tutorials and have a basic understanding of it.  It is also assumed that you have practised on the previous examples shown so that you have grasped the syntax notations so that writing simple queries is possible by yourself.

Here the 'ORDER BY' clause is executed on the 'Employees' table.

The ORDER BY clause

The 'ORDER BY" clause sorts the results either in ascending or descending order. By default it is ascending unless specified. It is used in SELECT statements. You can use more than one column in the ORDER BY clause. The only criteria is that whatever columns you are ordering by, it should be present in the list of columns that you are displaying.

SQL ORDER BY clause in Select Statements.

The SELECT Statement Example with ORDER BY clause

The Select statement on the 'Employees' table below displays all the employees.


The Select statement on the 'Employees' table below displays all the employees but it is arranged according to the employee names in ascending order as shown below.



The Select statement on the 'Employees' table below displays all the employees but it is arranged according to the employee names in descending order as shown below. To do this just add the word DESC to the end of the orderby column name.