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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, COCKROACHDB, DB2, DUCKDB, EXASOL, FIREBIRD, H2, HANA, INFORMIX, MARIADB, MEMSQL, MYSQL, 
-- ORACLE, POSTGRES, REDSHIFT, SNOWFLAKE, SQLDATAWAREHOUSE, SQLITE, SQLSERVER, SYBASE, TERADATA, TRINO, VERTICA, YUGABYTEDB
row_number() OVER (ORDER BY BOOK.ID)

-- ACCESS, ASE, AURORA_MYSQL, DERBY, HSQLDB
/* UNSUPPORTED */

(These are currently generated with jOOQ 3.19, see #10141), or translate your own on our website

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