We can use the SELECT statement and its clauses and keywords to organize and summarize data. In this section, we will cover these clauses.
By default, when you query the data in a table with no clustered index, SQL Server does not guarantee the order in which data is returned and returns rows in a random order. If the table has a clustered index, SQL Server returns the rows in a clustered index order. Therefore, we use the ORDER BY clause in your SELECT statements to sort the data returned by the query based on the columns' sort order specified in the ORDER BY clause. The ORDER BY clause guarantees the order in which data is returned.
For example, to display a sales representative's sales-related information ordered by the FirstName and LastName values, we would run the following query:
SELECT *
FROM [Sales].[vSalesPerson]
ORDER BY [FirstName] ASC,
[LastName] ASC;