It is often useful to list the data in our result set in a particular order.

We can sort the results using ORDER BY, either alphabetically or numerically. Sorting the results often makes the data more useful and easier to analyze.

For example, if we want to sort everything by the movie’s title from A through Z:

SELECT *
FROM movies
ORDER BY name;

• ORDER BY is a clause that indicates you want to sort the result set by a particular column.

• name is the specified column.

Sometimes we want to sort things in a decreasing order. For example, if we want to select all of the well-received movies, sorted from highest to lowest by their year:

SELECT *
FROM movies
WHERE imdb_rating > 8
ORDER BY year DESC;

• DESC is a keyword used in ORDER BY to sort the results in descending order (high to low or Z-A).

• ASC is a keyword used in ORDER BY to sort the results in ascending order (low to high or A-Z).

The column that we ORDER BY doesn’t even have to be one of the columns that we’re displaying.

Note: ORDER BY always goes after WHERE (if WHERE is present).