Order by in MS SQL Server

In this article, order by and terms related to order by will be discussed.

Introduction –

1. There are some instances where the tables are to be arranged in a chronological order.
2. While the users use the select statement to retrieve rows, one cannot guarantee that the rows are arranged in an order.
3. To solve this, order by clause is being used.

Basic syntax:

select 
select_list
from
table_name
order by 

Example: Sample table-Student

Roll number	Name	Course
111	Riya	CSE
112	Apoorva	ECE
113	Mina	Mech
114	Rita	Biotechnology
115	Veena	Chemical
116	Deepa	EEE

If a user wants to arrange the names in an order then the query must be written as follows:

select
roll number 
name 
course
from
student
order by name 

The output is:

Roll number	Name	Course
112	Apoorva	ECE
116	Deepa	EEE
113	Mina	Mech
114	Rita	Biotechnology
111	Riya	Biotechnology
115	Veena	Chemical

Note that the table is arranged in ascending order by default using the order by clause.

ASC | DESC :

1. A user can arrange the columns in ascending or descending order using ASC or DESC respectively.
2. ASC arranges the columns from lowest to highest
3. DESC arranges the columns from highest to lowest.
4. If there is a NULL column in the table, it will be treated as the lowest value.