ORDER BY (ASC|DESC): This is similar to the RDBMS ORDER BY statement. A sorted order is maintained across all of the output from every reducer. It performs the global sort using only one reducer, so it takes a longer time to return the result. Usage with LIMIT is strongly recommended for ORDER BY. When hive.mapred.mode = strict (by default, hive.mapred.mode = nonstrict) is set and we do not specify LIMIT, there are exceptions. This can be used as follows:

jdbc:hive2://> SELECT name FROM employee ORDER BY NAME DESC;
+----------+
|   name   |
+----------+
| Will     |
| Shelley  |
| Michael  |
| Lucy     |
+----------+
4 rows selected (57.057 seconds)

SORT BY (ASC|DESC): This indicates which columns to sort when ordering...