Sorting Table Data

A fundamental requirement of a database development environment is the capability to sort records quickly so that they appear in the desired sequence. Early desktop database managers, such as dBASE II and III/III+, required that you create a new copy of a table if you physically wanted to sort the table's records in a new order. Creating and specifying an index on a field table enabled you to display or print the table in index order. If you wanted to sort the data by two or more fields, however, you had to create a composite index on the fields or presort the data in the order of one or more fields, and then apply the single-field index.

Modern desktop database development systems, such as Access, never require that you physically ...

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