First Steps - Mastering phpMyAdmin 2.11 for Effective MySQL Management - page 74

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 when data was entered, or by primary key, but 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 sort occurred by watching the SQL query at the top of
screen; it should contain 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, or SMART , which means that fields of type DATE , TIME ,
DATETIME , and TIMESTAMP would be sorted in descending order, and other field
types in ascending order.