impala ORDER BY clause

The Impala ORDER BY clause is used to sort data in ascending or descending order based on one or more columns. B y default, some databases sort query results in ascending order.

Grammar

The following is the syntax of the ORDER BY clause.

select * from table_name ORDER BY col_name [ASC|DESC] [NULLS FIRST|NULLS LAST]

You can use the keyword ASC or DESC to rank the data in ascending or descending order, respectively.

In the same way, if we use NULLS FIRST, all the empty values in the table are arranged in the top row; I f we use NULLS LAST, the rows containing the empty values will end up arranged.

Cases

Suppose we have my_db table called customers in the database database, which reads as follows -

[quickstart.cloudera:21000] > select * from customers;
Query: select * from customers 
+----+----------+-----+-----------+--------+ 
| id | name     | age | address   | salary | 
+----+----------+-----+-----------+--------+ 
| 3  | kaushik  | 23  | Kota      | 30000  | 
| 1  | Ramesh   |  32 | Ahmedabad | 20000  | 
| 2  | Khilan   | 25  | Delhi     | 15000  | 
| 6  | Komal    | 22  | MP        | 32000  | 
| 4  | Chaitali | 25  | Mumbai    | 35000  | 
| 5  | Hardik   | 27  | Bhopal    | 40000  | 
+----+----------+-----+-----------+--------+ 
Fetched 6 row(s) in 0.51s

The following is an example of using the order by clause to arrange the data in the customers table in ascending order of its ID.

[quickstart.cloudera:21000] > Select * from customers ORDER BY id asc;

At execution time, the above query produces the following output.

Query: select * from customers ORDER BY id asc 
+----+----------+-----+-----------+--------+ 
| id | name     | age | address   | salary | 
+----+----------+-----+-----------+--------+ 
| 1  | Ramesh   | 32  | Ahmedabad | 20000  | 
| 2  | Khilan   | 25  | Delhi     | 15000  | 
| 3  | kaushik  | 23  | Kota      | 30000  | 
| 4  | Chaitali | 25  | Mumbai    | 35000  | 
| 5  | Hardik   | 27  | Bhopal    | 40000  | 
| 6  | Komal    | 22  | MP        | 32000  | 
+----+----------+-----+-----------+--------+ 
Fetched 6 row(s) in 0.56s

Similarly, you can use the order by clause to arrange the data for the customers table in descending order, as shown below.

[quickstart.cloudera:21000] > Select * from customers ORDER BY id desc;

At execution time, the above query produces the following output.

Query: select * from customers ORDER BY id desc 
+----+----------+-----+-----------+--------+ 
| id | name     | age | address   | salary | 
+----+----------+-----+-----------+--------+ 
| 6  | Komal    | 22  | MP        | 32000  | 
| 5  | Hardik   | 27  | Bhopal    | 40000  | 
| 4  | Chaitali | 25  | Mumbai    | 35000  | 
| 3  | kaushik  | 23  | Kota      | 30000  | 
| 2  | Khilan   | 25  | Delhi     | 15000  |
| 1  | Ramesh   | 32  | Ahmedabad | 20000  | 
+----+----------+-----+-----------+--------+ 
Fetched 6 row(s) in 0.54s