PHP Order By

The ORDER BY clause is used to sort the result set in ascending or descending order based on one or more columns.

Syntax

SELECT column_name(s)
FROM table_name
ORDER BY column1 [ASC|DESC], column2 [ASC|DESC], ...

Example

Consider a table named students with columns name, age, and total_marks. The following query retrieves the name and total marks of all the students sorted in descending order by their total marks:

SELECT name, total_marks
FROM students
ORDER BY total_marks DESC;

Output

The above query generates output in the following format:

+------+-------------+
| name | total_marks |
+------+-------------+
| John |         900 |
| Mary |         820 |
| Paul |         780 |
| Jane |         720 |
+------+-------------+

Explanation

In the above example, the ORDER BY clause is used to sort the result set in descending order based on the total_marks column.

Use

The ORDER BY clause is used to sort the result set in ascending or descending order based on one or more columns. It is extensively used in applications where data needs to be displayed in a sorted order.

Important Points

• The ORDER BY clause should always be the last clause in a select statement.
• The ASC keyword is optional because sorting in ascending order is the default behavior.
• The DESC keyword is used to sort the result set in descending order.

Summary

The ORDER BY clause is used to sort the result set in ascending or descending order based on one or more columns. It is a powerful tool that allows developers to retrieve data in a sorted order, which is essential in many applications.