SAS Certification Prep Guide, 4th Edition

Ordering Rows

Overview

The order of rows in the output of a PROC SQL query cannot be guaranteed, unless you specify a sort order. To sort rows by the values of specific columns, you can use the ORDER BY clause in the SELECT statement. Specify the keywords ORDER BY, followed by one or more column names separated by commas.

In the following PROC SQL query, the ORDER BY clause sorts rows by values of the column JobCode:

proc sql;
   select empid,jobcode,salary,
          salary*.06 as bonus
     from sasuser.payrollmaster
     where salary<32000
      order by jobcode;

Note: In this example, the ORDER BY clause is the last clause in the SELECT statement, so the ORDER BY clause ends with a semicolon.

In the output of the sample query, shown below, the rows are sorted by ...