Order! Order!

Of course, retrieving the rows in any order SQL Server desires may not always be what you desire. However, it is possible to change the order in which you return rows. This is achieved through the ORDER BY clause, which is part of the SELECT statement. The ORDER BY clause can have multiple columns, even with some being in ascending order and others in descending order.

If you should find that you are repeatedly using the same columns within an ORDER BY clause, or that the query is taking some time to run, you should consider having the columns within the query as an index. (Indexes were covered in Chapter 6.)

Ordering the data will of course increase processing time, but it is used as a necessity to display the data in the correct order. Ordering on varchar columns also takes longer than numeric columns.