Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft® SQL Server T-SQL in 10 Minutes, Second Edition

Lesson 5. Sorting Retrieved Data

In this lesson, you learn how to use the SELECT statement’s ORDER BY clause to sort retrieved data as needed.

Sorting Data

As you learned in the last lesson, the following SQL statement returns a single column from a database table. But look at the output. The data appears to be displayed in no particular order at all.

Input

SELECT prod_name FROM products;

Output

prod_name -------------- .5 ton anvil 1 ton anvil 2 ton anvil Detonator Bird seed Carrots Fuses JetPack 1000 JetPack 2000 Oil can Safe Sling TNT (1 ...