Sort Results Part 1

Part of the Fundamentals section of Coddy's SQL journey — lesson 13 of 72.

When querying a database, organizing your results in a meaningful order can make data analysis much more efficient. To sort the result we use the ORDER BY keyword and after that, we should specify by which field we are ordering by. By default, it sorts by ascending order.

For example consider the following competition table:

runner_id	age	avg_speed
1	47	3.65
2	62	3.07
3	57	6.82
4	56	4.34
5	25	4.93
6	40	3.94
7	23	6.58
8	40	3.43

SELECT *
FROM competition
WHERE age > 50
ORDER BY avg_speed

This is the result

runner_id	age	avg_speed
2	62	3.07
4	56	4.34
3	57	6.82

To specify how to sort that data we can add DESC or ASC keywords after the name of the column.

ORDER BY avg_speed ASC

Challenge

Easy

Available tables and columns:
feathers: id, weight

Return all of the ids after ordering them by the weight in descending order

Cheat sheet

Use ORDER BY to sort query results. By default, it sorts in ascending order:

SELECT *
FROM table_name
ORDER BY column_name

To specify sort direction, add ASC (ascending) or DESC (descending):

ORDER BY column_name DESC
ORDER BY column_name ASC

Try it yourself

Test yourself

This lesson includes a short quiz. Start the lesson to answer it and track your progress.

All lessons in Fundamentals

3Specific Return Format

Null valuesSort Results Part 1Sort Results Part 2 Recap - Cyber Security Firm Limit number of records Recap - Vehicle Factory

6Intro Challenges

Recap - Parliamentary Election Recap - Police Criminal Arrest Recap - Bar Beverage Container Recap - Engineer new columns

9Multiple tables

Basic Join Part 1 Basic Join Part 2 Recap - Join Self join Recap - Self Join Union Simplify queries, WITH keyword Recap - With Queries Recap - Real Estate Contractor

12Window Functions part 2

RANK & DENSE_RANK Functions Recap - RANK & DENSE_RANK NTILE Function Aggregation Functions ROWS & RANGE Criterion