Question

I am learning about the MySQL statement, ORDER BY. I ran into this tutorial where they show an example with two clauses. How is that possible? For example:

SELECT * FROM table_name ORDER BY 
score DESC, date ASC;

How is that possible to have to order by two clauses? It doesn’t make sense to me. How can your results be ordered twice?

Answer 1

This query will do something like:

   ORDER score descending
   IF there are two rows with same score
   ORDER date ascending

Simply, if you have this table

score    date
1        11111
1        11113
2        11112

this will get you result

score    date 
2        11112
1        11111
1        11113