SQL Order By Multiple Columns

In this tutorial, you will learn how to sort the result set on multiple columns using the SQL ORDER BY clause. 

Sometimes we may need to sort the result set on more than one column. 

Syntax

The syntax for sorting result set on multiple columns is as below.

SELECT expressions 
FROM tables
ORDER BY column1 [ ASC | DESC], column2 [ ASC | DESC], ...., columnN [ ASC | DESC];

Example

Suppose we have an Employee table in our database with the following data.

Now let’s display all information for each employee sorted by the first Salary in descending order and then by Name in ascending order.

SELECT * FROM Employee
ORDER BY SALARY DESC, NAME;

In the above example, records are first sorted by Salary in descending order and if multiple records exist for the same salary, those records are sorted by Name in ascending order.