Big SQL Energy Beginner Course: Lesson 2 Order By

Jan 02, 2025

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Hi BDEs! Welcome to Lesson 2 of the free Big SQL Energy Beginner Course⚡️ Today we’re learning how to sort datasets with Order By!

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Lesson 2: Order By

🎥 Video

Now that you’ve learned how to pull some data using SELECT and FROM combined with * or column names, I bet you’re wondering how to sort data in SQL. It can be really hard to see any trends or insights with a large amounts of data, so sometimes we have to summarize, rearrange, or reshape data in order to learn more. However, I do want to caution you that sorting an entire dataset can have negative impacts to optimization since it can take a lot of time and power to sort a very large dataset. But let’s ignore that for now since we’re learning the basics— I talk more about optimization in my 🔗intermediate course.

To sort a dataset in SQL, we have to use the ORDER BY clause in SQL. By default, ORDER BY sorts in ascending order, or in other words smallest to largest. We can add it after FROM like this:

select
   *
from
   table
order by
   order_date

There are other SQL clauses that sometimes go between FROM and ORDER BY, but we’ll learn those later. If you want to switch the order to descending order (largest to smallest), you can do it by adding “desc” after the column name:

select
   *
from
   table
order by
   order_date desc

And of course you can order by multiple columns as well too. It’ll order by the first column and then by the second column. Here’s a few examples of that. Notice how including desc and changing the position changes our ordering:

select
   *
from
   table
order by
   customer_id, order_date
;


select
   *
from
   table
order by
   customer_id, order_date desc
;

select
   *
from
   table
order by
   customer_id desc, order_date
;

select
   *
from
   table
order by
   customer_id desc, order_date desc
;

In some SQL dialects (especially in newer cloud platforms like Snowflake for example), you can use a shorthand notation to represent the column name based on the columns selected in the SELECT statement. Order by 1, 2 orders by the first and second column in your select statement for example:

select
   *
from
   table
order by
   1, 2
;

And that’s how we can sort datasets in SQL! See you tomorrow for the next lesson!

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