First Steps - Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.1 for Effective MySQL Management - page 77

Sorting results
In SQL, we can never be sure of the order in which the data is retrieved, unless
we explicitly sort the data. Some implementations of the retrieving engine may
show results in the same order as the one in which data was entered, or according
to a primary key. However, a sure way to get results in the order we want is by
sorting them explicitly.
When browsing results are displayed, any column header can be clicked to sort
on this column, even if it is not part of an index. Let's click on the author_id
column header.
We can confirm that the sorting has occurred, by watching the SQL query at the top
of screen; it contains an ORDER BY clause.
We now see a small red triangle pointing upwards beside the author_id header.
This means that the current sort order is 'ascending'. Moving the mouse cursor over
the author_id header makes the red triangle change direction, to indicate what will
happen if we click on the header—a sort by descending author_id .
Another way to sort is by key. The Sort dialog shows all the keys already defined.
Here we see a key named PRIMARY —the name given to our primary key on the
isbn field when we checked Primary for this field at creation time:
This might be the only way to sort on multiple fields at once (for multi-fields
indexes).
The default initial sort order is defined in $cfg['Order'] with ASC for ascending,
DESC for descending. The sort order can also be or SMART , which means that fields of
type DATE , TIME , DATETIME , and TIMESTAMP would be sorted in descending order,
whereas other field types will be sorted in ascending order.