Home/ Questions/Q 4337224
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-21T10:54:53+00:00

Is there any way in SQLite to ORDER BY a date, and have result

  • 0

Is there any way in SQLite to ORDER BY a date, and have result be ordered by time rather than alphabetically?

For example:

SELECT * FROM details GROUP BY date;

John    |     Smith     |     April 01, 2011
John    |     Smith     |     April 03, 2011
John    |     Smith     |     April 04, 2011
John    |     Smith     |     March 25, 2011

March should come before April.

I’m guessing that the answer here is to store my dates as long timestamps, however I wasn’t sure if it could be done more easily with SQLite.

Thanks!

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    There isn’t a built-in DATE type in SQLite (as exists in some other database management systems), but it does have a nice complement of date and time functions: http://www.sqlite.org/lang_datefunc.html

    You can use date(“April 01, 2011”) to get back an ISO-8601 date (e.g., 2011-04-01).

    This format has the advantages of both being a readable string and being sortable. 2011-03-25 naturally comes before 2011-04-01 by standard string comparison rules, so there’s no special operation required.

    So, store your dates in that format, and get that format using the date() function (or other relevant function).

    • 0