Available in versions: Dev (3.20) | Latest (3.19) | 3.18 | 3.17 | 3.16 | 3.15 | 3.14 | 3.13 | 3.12 | 3.11 | 3.10

ORDER BY

Applies to ✅ Open Source Edition   ✅ Express Edition   ✅ Professional Edition   ✅ Enterprise Edition

The ORDER BY clause allows for ordering a window, which may be required by a window function to produce a deterministic result.

There are 2 reasons to order window functions:

While the window frame ordering will be discussed later, it is easy to see how ROW_NUMBER relies on ordering in an example:

SELECT
  BOOK.ID,
  row_number() OVER (ORDER BY id DESC)
FROM
  BOOK
create.select(
         BOOK.ID,
         rowNumber().over(orderBy(BOOK.ID.desc())))
      .from(BOOK)
      .fetch();

Producing:

+----+------------+
| id | row_number |
+----+------------+
|  1 |          4 |
|  2 |          3 |
|  3 |          2 |
|  4 |          1 |
+----+------------+
If you omit the ORDER BY clause (and if that's supported in a window function), then no frame clause is implied, and thus the entire window partition is being considered.

Dialect support

This example using jOOQ:

rowNumber().over(orderBy(BOOK.ID))

Translates to the following dialect specific expressions:

Aurora Postgres, BigQuery, ClickHouse, CockroachDB, DB2, DuckDB, Exasol, Firebird, H2, Hana, Informix, MariaDB, MemSQL, MySQL, Oracle, Postgres, Redshift, SQLDataWarehouse, SQLServer, SQLite, Snowflake, Sybase, Teradata, Trino, Vertica, YugabyteDB

row_number() OVER (ORDER BY BOOK.ID)

ASE, Access, Aurora MySQL, Derby, HSQLDB

/* UNSUPPORTED */
Generated with jOOQ 3.20. Translate your own SQL on our website

Feedback

Do you have any feedback about this page? We'd love to hear it!

The jOOQ Logo