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This question came up in a discussion at work... given the following T-SQL statement:

select firstname, lastname from users order by lastname;

the default sort order on the order by clause is asc.

Is there a setting within SQL Server that will allow you to change the default order used when the ASC|DESC modifiers are not specified?

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1 Answer

up vote 7 down vote accepted

No, the default sort order is always ASC.

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which is required by the SQL standard if I'm not mistaken (but that wouldn't bother Microsoft on the other hand...) – a_horse_with_no_name Feb 14 at 22:02
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@a_horse_with_no_name I think 5-10 years ago that would have been a fair statement, but they've been much better in recent versions at actually paying attention to the standards. They've at least stopped violating them, and I welcome extensions they add over and above what the standard defines. – Aaron Bertrand Feb 14 at 22:29

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