How do you sort results by multiple columns in SQL?

Do you need to order the rows returned by your query using several different columns?

It's very simple.

In SQL, you can simply list as many fields as you want in the ORDER BY clause, separating them with commas.

Example

Let's imagine that we want to sort our users by age, but we also want to sort them alphabetically for all those having the same age.

Here's the query you'll need to write:

SELECT 
  id,   
  firstname,
  lastname,   
  age
FROM User
ORDER BY age DESC, lastname ASC;

Note that the first columns in the ORDER BY take priority, unlike the implementation of chained sorting in classic programming!