Programming the Perl DBI

Ordering data

Ordering the data retrieved by a SELECT statement is easy and can be achieved simply by an ORDER BY clause. This clause is always found at the end of your queries, after all the join conditions have been specified.

The ORDER BY clause is specified as a comma-separated list of columns that should be used to order the data. For example, an ORDER BY clause of:

ORDER BY name, location

would order the rows by name and, if the names of the sites are identical, the location column would be used as a secondary ordering. You can change the direction of the ordering from the default ``ascending'' order (which goes from A to Z) to a ``descending'' order by appending the DESC keyword to any field names in the ORDER BY clause.