The SELECT Statement and Basic Querying Techniques | 151

| 2.90 | I Just Want To See His Face |
| 2.97 | Sweet Black Angel |
| 2.99 | Your Star Will Shine |
| 3.00 | Shake Your Hips |
| 3.08 | Happy |
| 3.20 | Dreams Never End |
| 3.26 | Straight To The Man |
| 3.40 | Under The Influence Of Love |
| 3.40 | Ventilator Blues |
| 3.42 | Cries And Whispers |
| 3.44 | Mesh
We’ve shown only part of the row output. Notice that there’s a collision of track times where the length is 3.40. In this case, the second sort key, track_name
, is used to resolve the collision so that Under the Influence of Love appears before “Ventilator
Blues.” You’ll find you often use multiple columns in an ORDER BY
clause when you’re sorting people’s names, where typically you’ll use something like ORDER BY surname,
firstname, secondname
You can also sort in descending order, and you can control this behavior for each sort key. Suppose you want to sort the artists by descending alphabetical order. You type this:
mysql> SELECT artist_name FROM artist ORDER BY artist_name DESC;
+---------------------------+
| artist_name |
+---------------------------+
| The Stone Roses |
| The Rolling Stones |
| Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds |
| New Order |
| Miles Davis |
| Kylie Minogue |
+---------------------------+
6 rows inset sec)
The
DESC
keyword specifies that the preceding sort key (in this case, artist_name
) should be sorted in descending order. You can use a mixture of ascending and descending orders when multiple sort keys are used. For example, you can sort by descending time and alphabetically increasing track_name
:
mysql> SELECT time, track_name FROM track
-> WHERE time < 3.6
-> ORDER BY time DESC, track_name ASC;
+------+------------------------------------------------------------+
| time | track_name |
+------+------------------------------------------------------------+
| 3.57 | Casino Boogie |
| 3.57 | Procession Polytechnic of Central London, London 6/12/85] |
| 3.56 | Your Disco Needs You |
| 3.55 | I'm So High |
| 3.55 | On A Night Like This |
| 3.54 | Mr. Pastorius |

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