First Steps - Mastering phpMyAdmin 2.8 for Effective MySQL Management - page 68

If we enter a big number in the Show...rows dialog, the
same results will be achieved (and we may face the same
potential problems).
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.
One obvious 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).
If we choose to sort by author_id (Descending) , we see:
We now see a small red triangle pointing downwards beside the author_id header.
This means that the current sort order is 'descending'. 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 ascending author_id .
In fact, all the column headers can be clicked to sort on this column, even if they are
not part of an index. We can confirm this by watching the SQL query at top of screen;
it should contain an ORDER BY clause.