SAS 9.4 SQL Procedure User's Guide, Fourth Edition, 4th Edition

Output 2.19 Sorting by Column Position

Sorting by Columns That Are Not Selected

You can sort query results by columns that are not included in the query. For example,

the following query returns all the rows in the Sql.Countries table and sorts them by

population, even though the Population column is not included in the query:

libname sql 'SAS-library';

proc sql outobs=12;

title 'Countries, Sorted by Population';

select Name, Continent

from sql.countries

order by Population;

42 Chapter 2 • Retrieving Data from a Single Table

Output 2.20 Sorting by Columns That Are Not Selected

Specifying a Different Sorting Sequence

SORTSEQ= is a PROC SQL statement option that specifies the sorting sequence for

PROC SQL to use when a query contains an ORDER BY clause. Use this option only if

you want to use a sorting sequence other than your operating environment's default

sorting sequence. Possible values include ASCII, EBCDIC, and some languages other

than English. For example, in an operating environment that supports the EBCDIC

sorting sequence, you could use the following option in the PROC SQL statement to set

the sorting sequence to EBCDIC:

proc sql sortseq=ebcdic;

In the third maintenance release for SAS 9.4, linguistic collation is supported with the

SORTSEQ statement option. For more information, see “SORTSEQ=sort-table |

LINGUISTIC” on page 229.

Note: SORTSEQ= affects only the ORDER BY clause. It does not override your

operating environment's default comparison operations for the WHERE clause.

Operating Environment Information

For more information about the default and other sorting sequences for your

operating environment, see the SAS documentation for your operating environment.

Sorting Columns That Contain Missing Values

PROC SQL sorts nulls, or missing values, before character or numeric data. Therefore,

when you specify ascending order, missing values appear first in the query results.

Sorting Data 43