Sorting results

You can order the result based on the column or aliased column. You can be specify DESC for descending order or ASC for ascending. By default, ordering will be ascending. You can combine the  LIMIT clause with ORDER BY to limit the results.

How to do it...

Find the employee IDs of the first five top-paid employees.

mysql> SELECT emp_no,salary FROM salaries ORDER BY salary DESC LIMIT 5;
+--------+--------+
| emp_no | salary |
+--------+--------+
|  43624 | 158220 |
|  43624 | 157821 |
| 254466 | 156286 |
|  47978 | 155709 |
| 253939 | 155513 |
+--------+--------+
5 rows in set (0.74 sec)

Instead of specifying the column name, you can also mention the position of the column in the SELECT statement. For example, you are selecting the salary at the second position in the SELECT statement. So, you can specify ORDER BY 2:

mysql> SELECT emp_no,salary FROM salaries ORDER BY 2 DESC LIMIT 5;
+--------+--------+
| emp_no | salary |
+--------+--------+
|  43624 | 158220 |
|  43624 ...