The basic SELECT statement usually returns
rows in the same order as they appear in the table.
Most of the time you will probably want to output results arranged in a specific order. The ORDER BY clause is used to sort the results by one or more columns. Columns are sorted in ascending or descending order.
Note: unless otherwise specified, columns will be sorted in ascending order by default.
Suppose you want to sort the VirtualBookShelf.com BookTable by title. The following SELECT statement does just that and returns the columns in ascending order: