Introduction

This chapter covers sorting, an operation that is extremely important for controlling how MySQL displays results from SELECT statements. Sorting is performed by adding an ORDER BY clause to a query. Without such a clause, MySQL is free to return rows in any order, so sorting helps bring order to disorder and make query results easier to examine and understand. (Sorting also is performed implicitly when you use a GROUP BY clause, as discussed in Recipe 7.14.)

One of the tables used for quite a few examples in this chapter is driver_log, a table that contains columns for recording daily mileage logs for a set of truck drivers:

mysql> SELECT * FROM driver_log;
+--------+-------+------------+-------+
| rec_id | name | trav_date | miles |
+--------+-------+------------+-------+
| 1 | Ben | 2001-11-30 | 152 |
| 2 | Suzi | 2001-11-29 | 391 |
| 3 | Henry | 2001-11-29 | 300 |
| 4 | Henry | 2001-11-27 | 96 |
| 5 | Ben | 2001-11-29 | 131 |
| 6 | Henry | 2001-11-26 | 115 |
| 7 | Suzi | 2001-12-02 | 502 |
| 8 | Henry | 2001-12-01 | 197 |
| 9 | Ben | 2001-12-02 | 79 |
| 10 | Henry | 2001-11-30 | 203 |
+--------+-------+------------+-------+

Many other examples use the mail table (first seen in earlier chapters):

mysql> SELECT * FROM mail;
+---------------------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+
| t | srcuser | srchost | dstuser | dsthost | size |
+---------------------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+
| 2001-05-11 10:15:08 | barb | saturn | tricia | mars | 58274 |
| 2001-05-12 12:48:13 | tricia | mars | gene | venus | 194925 |
| 2001-05-12 15:02:49 | phil | mars | phil | saturn | 1048 |
| 2001-05-13 13:59:18 | barb | saturn | tricia | venus | 271 |
| 2001-05-14 09:31:37 | gene | venus | barb | mars | 2291 |
| 2001-05-14 11:52:17 | phil | mars | tricia | saturn | 5781 |
| 2001-05-14 14:42:21 | barb | venus | barb | venus | 98151 |
| 2001-05-14 17:03:01 | tricia | saturn | phil | venus | 2394482 |
| 2001-05-15 07:17:48 | gene | mars | gene | saturn | 3824 |
| 2001-05-15 08:50:57 | phil | venus | phil | venus | 978 |
| 2001-05-15 10:25:52 | gene | mars | tricia | saturn | 998532 |
| 2001-05-15 17:35:31 | gene | saturn | gene | mars | 3856 |
| 2001-05-16 09:00:28 | gene | venus | barb | mars | 613 |
| 2001-05-16 23:04:19 | phil | venus | barb | venus | 10294 |
| 2001-05-17 12:49:23 | phil | mars | tricia | saturn | 873 |
| 2001-05-19 22:21:51 | gene | saturn | gene | venus | 23992 |
+---------------------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+

Other tables are used occasionally as well. You can create most of them with the scripts found in the tables directory of the recipes distribution. The baseball1 directory contains instructions for creating the tables used in the examples relating to the baseball1.com baseball database.