ORDER BY 1,2,3,4

Question

What does order by 1, 2, 3, 4 stand for?

Answer 1

Sort by ordinal positions of columns

SQL Server allows you to sort the result set based on the ordinal positions of columns that appear in the select list.

The following statement sorts the customers by first name and last name. But instead of specifying the column names explicitly, it uses the ordinal positions of the columns:

SELECT
    first_name,
    last_name
FROM
    sales.customers
ORDER BY
    1,
    2;

In this example, 1 means the first_name column and 2 means the last_name column.

Using the ordinal positions of columns in the ORDER BY clause is considered as bad programming practice for a couple of reasons.

1. First, the columns in a table don’t have ordinal positions and need to be referenced by name.
2. Second, when you modify the select list, you may forget to make the corresponding changes in the ORDER BY clause.

Therefore, it is a good practice to always specify the column names explicitly in the ORDER BY clause.

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