order by reverse order?

[mrdance]

I have a field which contains this format,
"2001-02-19 16:14:49". How do I use ORDER BY to sort the records in reverse order i.e. newest "dates" first?

Thanks , Henrik

[dglachs]

If it is a character field (CHAR, VARCHAR) = no chance to get it sorted by the database.

If it is a date field (DATE, DATETIME, TIMESTAMP) just add "DESC" to your order-clause:

select dttime
from table
order by dttime desc

HTH

[[deleted]]

If this is a char/varchar: sorting gets harder, but not "no chance"

[dglachs]

Sorry, it was meant, that you let the database do the sorting stuff, and if you try to sort a character field either ascending or descending by the database it will do that depending on the characters, isn't it?

But, you are right, if the date field has the correct format, sorting will work, but what happens, if you change the format to: m/d/Y? This will cause the problem.

Regards

[[deleted]]

Indeed, if you sort a number that is stored as a character, it will be sorted by character.
But, if you format your dates properly, that means: including leading zeros, the character order and the numeric order are the same.

nevertheless, you'd have to build a custom ordering query to order by year/month/day. Because, like you say, if the order is changed to month/day/year, the ordering changes.

If the field is a dat however, MySQL will order it correctly by itself.

[Anon]

Thank you so much for that info. I am sorta new to stuff like ASP and I could not think of how to change the order so the new things were first. I had two pages which needed the order changed and that DESC thing worked to fix my problem. thank you!