Multi-column Sorting
Multi-column sorting consists of organizing search results depending on the values from two or more columns. Let’s take a database table containing employee records with columns such as Name, Department, and Salary as an example. Sorting solely by Name may not suffice in scenarios where multiple employees share the same name. In such cases, secondary sorting criteria, like Department or Salary, become essential to achieve a meaningful order.
Syntax Overview:
In SQL, the ORDER BY clause facilitates sorting. To sort by multiple columns, simply specify each column name separated by commas. The syntax is as follows:
SELECT column1, column2, ...
FROM table_name
ORDER BY column1 ASC/DESC, column2 ASC/DESC, ...;
- ASC: Ascending order (default).
- DESC: Descending order.
Sorting Data According to More Than One Column in SQL
In the world of relational databases, SQL (Structured Query Language) is probably the language one will need to use to manage and manipulate data. Sorting of data is one of the basic operations in SQL that helps users to get query results arranged as they want. If sorting on one column is simple enough, there are cases when it is better to sort by multiple columns. In this article, we will see what multi-column sorting is and then some example queries on sorting data according to more than one column.
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