In this section, you will add an ORDER BY clause to the SELECT statement to display results in alphabetical or numerical order.
Unless otherwise requested, Sybase IQ displays the rows of a table in no particular order. Often it is useful to look at the rows in a table in a more meaningful sequence. For example, you might like to see employees in alphabetical order.
The following example shows how adding an ORDER BY clause to the SELECT statement causes the results to be retrieved in alphabetical order.
SELECT * FROM employee ORDER BY emp_lname
emp_id |
manager_id |
emp_fname |
emp_lname |
dept_id |
|---|---|---|---|---|
1751 |
1576 |
Alex |
Ahmed |
400 |
1013 |
703 |
Joseph |
Barker |
500 |
591 |
1576 |
Irene |
Barletta |
400 |
191 |
703 |
Jeannette |
Bertrand |
500 |
1336 |
1293 |
Janet |
Bigelow |
300 |
The order of the clauses is important. The ORDER BY clause must follow the FROM clause and the SELECT clause.
If
you omit the FROM clause, or if all tables in the query are in the SYSTEM
dbspace, the query is processed by Adaptive Server Anywhere instead
of Sybase IQ and may behave differently, especially with respect
to syntactic and semantic restrictions and the effects of option
settings. See the Adaptive Server Anywhere documentation for rules
that may apply to processing.
If you have a query that does not require a FROM clause, you can force the query to be processed by Sybase IQ by adding the clause “FROM iq_dummy,” where iq_dummy is a one row, one column table that you create in your database.
