Sort

• One column or a list of columns to sort by
• Each column can be prefixed with:
  • -, for descending order
• When using prefixes, even a single column needs to be in a list or parentheses. (Otherwise, sort -foo is parsed as a subtraction between sort and foo.)

PRQL

from employees
sort age

SQL

SELECT
  *
FROM
  employees
ORDER BY
  age

PRQL

from employees

SQL

PRQL

from employees
sort [age, -tenure, +salary]

SQL

SELECT
  *
FROM
  employees
  age,
  tenure DESC,
  salary

PRQL

from employees
sort [s"substr({first_name}, 2, 5)"]

SQL

PRQL

sort tenure
derive name = f"{first_name} {last_name}"

SQL

SELECT
  *,
  CONCAT(first_name, ' ', last_name) AS name
FROM
  employees
ORDER BY
  tenure

• This is an implementation detail of the DB. If there are instances where this doesn’t hold, please open an issue, and we’ll consider how to manage it.
• Some transforms which change the existence of rows, such as join or group, won’t persist ordering; for example:

PRQL

from employees

SQL