5.4. Order By

It is often useful to sort a table of data by a given column. For example, you might want to sort a dataset by date to put events into a chronological order.

To sort rows in SQL we use the ORDER BY keyword. This comes after your SELECT, FROM and WHERE statements. By default, we sort in ascending order, but if you want to be explicit you can use the keyword ASC. To sort in descending order we can use the keyword DESC.

The structure of an ORDER BY statement is:

ORDER BY attribute ASC|DESC;

Here is an example of a query that selects all columns from the transactions table, but orders the rows an ascending order by id.

SELECT *
FROM transactions
ORDER BY id;