Order By

Andrew Bone

How to Sort Values in a Specific Order in SQL

Sometimes you will be required to order your data in a particular way, and often the use of typical sort modifiers like ASC and DESC are not enough. This article will show you how to use the CASE statement to order your data exactly how you need it to be. Have you ever needed to order your data in a very specific way? One of the best methods for handling complex sorting is using CASE.

Andrew Bone

What Is the SQL GROUPING SETS Clause, and How Do You Use it?

GROUPING SETS are groups, or sets, of columns by which rows can be grouped together. Instead of writing multiple queries and combining the results with a UNION, you can simply use GROUPING SETS. GROUPING SETS in SQL can be considered an extension of the GROUP BY clause. It allows you to define multiple grouping sets in the same query. Let’s look at its syntax and how it can be equivalent to a GROUP BY with multiple UNION ALL clauses.

Kateryna Koidan

A Detailed Guide to SQL ORDER BY

It’s often necessary to display the output of SQL query in specific order rather than arbitrarily. In this article, I’ll explain the many ways you can do it with the SQL ORDER BY clause. To sort records in SQL, you’ll need to use the ORDER BY clause.  In this article, I’ll explain in detail how to use ORDER BY to sort output by one or more columns, in ascending (A-Z) or descending (Z-A) order, and by using existing column(s) or using column(s) calculated by an aggregate function.

Kateryna Koidan

What Does ORDER BY Do?

When analyzing data, it often helps to have rows ordered in a specific way. In this article, I’ll use multiple examples to show how SQL ORDER BY sorts data according to one or more columns in ascending or descending order. Introduction to ORDER BY By default, the order of rows in the output of an SQL query is arbitrary. If you want to sort the output in a particular order, you’ll need to use the ORDER BY keyword.

Kateryna Koidan

GROUP BY in SQL Explained

The SQL GROUP BY statement is easy to use, but it can be hard to master. Learn what you can do with GROUP BY, how it works, and how to use it with aggregate functions. GROUP BY is one of the basic SQL tools. However, it might be difficult for beginners to understand how GROUP BY works and how it is used to compute statistics with different aggregate functions. In this article, I’ll use several examples to show exactly how GROUP BY organizes rows and how aggregate functions can be used to calculate statistics on one or more columns.

Zahin Rahman

How to Find Duplicate Values in SQL

Duplicate records waste time, space, and money. Learn how to find and fix duplicate values using SQL’s GROUP BY and HAVING clauses. Database best practices usually dictate having unique constraints (such as the primary key) on a table to prevent the duplication of rows when data is extracted and consolidated. However, you may find yourself working on a dataset with duplicate rows. This could be because of human error, an application bug, or uncleaned data that’s been extracted and merged from external sources, among other things.

Kateryna Koidan

How ORDER BY and NULL Work Together in SQL

Do NULL values come first or last when you use ORDER BY? Are they considered higher or lower than non-NULL values? In this article, I’ll explain how different relational databases treat NULL values when sorting output and how to change the default behavior of the ORDER BY clause. When LearnSQL users practice the ORDER BY clause in our SQL Basics course, they often ask why NULL values appear first in the output and how they can change this behavior.

Shanika Wickramasinghe

Difference between GROUP BY and ORDER BY in Simple Words

For someone who is learning SQL, one of the most common places to get stuck is when learning the GROUP BY command. GROUP BY and ORDER BY are two important keywords in SQL that we use to organize data. The difference between GROUP BY and ORDER BY is that ORDER BY is more simple than GROUP BY and is usually introduced early in an SQL course. Sometimes, people are quite confused over these two concepts (SQL ORDER BY vs.

Dorota Wdzięczna

How to Sort Records with the ORDER BY Clause

Relational databases don't store records in alphabetical, numerical, ascending, or in any particular order. The only way to order records in the result set is to use the ORDER BY clause. You can use this clause to order rows by a column, a list of columns, or an expression. You can also order rows using the CASE expression. In this post, we'll take a look at the ORDER BY clause – how to write it, how it works, and what it does.