The ORDER BY keyword is used to sort the data in a recordset.

The ORDER BY Keyword

The ORDER BY keyword is used to sort the data in a recordset.

Syntax

SELECT column_name(s)
FROM table_name
ORDER BY column_name

Note: SQL statements are not case sensitive. ORDER BY is the same as order by.

Example

The following example selects all the data stored in the "Person" table, and sorts the result by the "Age" column:

<?php
$con = mysql_connect("localhost","peter","abc123");
if (!$con)
  {
  die('Could not connect: ' . mysql_error());
  }

mysql_select_db("my_db", $con);

$result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM person ORDER BY age");

while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result))
  {
  echo $row['FirstName']
  echo " " . $row['LastName'];
  echo " " . $row['Age'];
  echo "<br />";
  }

mysql_close($con);
?>

The output of the code above will be:

Glenn Quagmire 33
Peter Griffin 35

Sort Ascending or Descending

If you use the ORDER BY keyword, the sort-order of the recordset is ascending by default (1 before 9 and "a" before "p").

Use the DESC keyword to specify a descending sort-order (9 before 1 and "p" before "a"):

SELECT column_name(s)
FROM table_name
ORDER BY column_name DESC

Order by Two Columns

It is possible to order by more than one column. When ordering by more than one column, the second column is only used if the values in the first column are identical:

SELECT column_name(s)
FROM table_name
ORDER BY column_name1, column_name2