How to Sort Multiple SQL Columns with Different Ascending and Descending Orders?

SQL multi-column sorting: flexible use of ascending and descending order

In SQL database operations, it is often necessary to sort multiple columns, not only for data organization, but more importantly to achieve specific sorting requirements. Suppose there is a table containing two columns, 'column1' and 'column2', and it is necessary to sort the 'column1' column in descending order while maintaining the 'column2' column in ascending order.

SQL's ORDER BY clause provides a concise syntax to implement different sorting directions for multiple columns. Its syntax is as follows:

ORDER BY column1 DESC, column2

In this example, the DESC keyword specifies the 'column1' column to be sorted in descending order, and the 'column2' column does not specify a sorting direction, so it defaults to ascending order (SQL's default sorting method).

This sorting strategy gives priority to the 'column1' column. Each record with a different 'column1' value will be arranged in the specified order. For records with the same 'column1' value, the query will be further sorted according to the ascending order of the 'column2' column.

For example, consider a table containing the following data:

column1	column2
10	5
30	20
20	15
20	10

Executing the following query against this table will produce the desired sorted results:

SELECT * FROM table ORDER BY column1 DESC, column2

The result will be:

column1	column2
30	20
20	10
20	15
10	5

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