Sorting the Database
One useful feature of database software is that it can
be used to sort the data in the database into order. If you have an
address book containing over a hundred people in it you might want to
order the address-database into people's surnames in alphabetical order
(just like the phone book).
On the other hand, you might want to find out who's going to be inviting
you to their birthday party. So you could re-order your address book
so that the surnames get mixed up but the values in the date-of-birth
field are now in order.
There are two ways to order dates (and other fields):
ascending and descending. If you order the dates in ascending order
then the first record in the database will have the date nearest to
January 1st (and descending order will start with the birthday
nearest December 31st).
The database table shown here has the records sorted so
that the manufacturer names are in ascending order.
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