Beginning Microsoft SQL Server 2008 ... - S3 Tech Training

Chapter 3: The Foundation Statements of T-SQL
SQL Server still chose the least-cost method of giving us our desired results, but the particular set of
tasks it actually needed to perform changed somewhat because the nature of the query changed.
We can also do our sorting using numeric fields (note that we’re querying a new table):
SELECT Name, SalesPersonID
FROM Sales.Store
WHERE Name BETWEEN ‘g’ AND ‘j’
AND SalesPersonID > 283
ORDER BY SalesPersonID, Name DESC;
This one results in:
Name SalesPersonID
-------------------------------------------------- -------------
Inexpensive Parts Shop 286
Ideal Components 286
Helpful Sales and Repair Service 286
Helmets and Cycles 286
Global Sports Outlet 286
Gears and Parts Company 286
Irregulars Outlet 288
Hometown Riding Supplies 288
Good Bicycle Store 288
Global Bike Retailers 288
Instruments and Parts Company 289
Instant Cycle Store 290
Impervious Paint Company 290
Hiatus Bike Tours 290
Getaway Inn 290
(15 row(s) affected)
Notice several things in this query: We’ve made use of many of the things that we’ve talked about up to
this point. We’ve combined multiple WHERE clause conditions and also have an ORDER BY clause in place.
In addition, we’ve added some new twists in our ORDER BY clause. First, we now have an ORDER BY
clause that sorts based on more than one column. To do this, we simply comma delimited the columns
we wanted to sort by. In this case, we’ve sorted first by SalesPersonID and then added a sub-sort based
on Name. Second, the DESC keyword tells SQL Server that our ORDER BY should work in descending order
for the Name sub-sort, rather than the default of ascending. (If you want to explicitly state that you want
it to be ascending, use ASC.)
While we usually sort the results based on one of the columns that we are returning,
it’s worth noting that the ORDER BY clause can be based on any column in any table
used in the query, regardless of whether it is included in the SELECT list.
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