Sorting

Introduction

The result of a query can be ordered with the ORDER BY clause. The ASC and DESC keywords can be added after the clause to specify the order of the sort.

Example

SELECT e.LastName, e.Salary 
    FROM Employee e 
    ORDER BY e.Salary DESC, e.LastName ASC

Sorting and Indexes

When there is an index matching the sort specification in the ORDER BY clause then the result can be obtained without executing any sorting. We therefore for performance reasons strongly recommend that necessary indexes are declared when using ORDER BY clauses as shown in statement below.

CREATE INDEX EmployeeIndex ON Employee (Salary DESC, LastName ASC)

Indexes