How to sort year and month order by in SQL

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Hi All,
am facing one problem in order by in sql.
Actually i want to display order by for year and month
My expected output is:

2015_Jan
2015_Feb
2015_Mar
2015_Apr
2015_May
2015_Jun
2015_Jul
2015_Aug
2015_Sep
2015_Oct
2015_Nov
2015_Dec
2016_Jan
--
-- etc

but as per my code am not getting like that,
i got the alphabetical order, which means,
staring from A to Z

below is my code,

SQL

select billdate from test ORDER BY YEAR(billdate),Month(billdate)

please drop me a solution.

with regards,
stellus

What I have tried:

how to sort year and month order by in sql

Posted 10-May-16 3:05am

stellus

Updated 6-Apr-22 2:55am

Patrice T

v2

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CHill60 10-May-16 9:23am

Is billdate a datetime field?

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CHill60 · Answer 1 · 2016-05-10T03:36:00

Based on your sample query

SQL

select billdate from test ORDER BY YEAR(billdate),Month(billdate)

You are going to have to convert the column to a date to get the correct ordering. E.g.

SQL

select billdate 
from test 
ORDER BY DATEPART(MM,SUBSTRING(billdate,1,4) + SUBSTRING(billdate, 6,3) + '01')

This is a truly awful way to go about things - billdate should be a date or datetime column in which case you could do something like

SQL

select cast(DATEPART(YY,billdate) as varchar) + '_' + convert(char(3), datename(month, billdate))
from test 
ORDER BY billdate

Which is also pretty awful.
What you should be doing is

SQL

select billdate from test order by billdate

and doing the formatting of the result in the presentation (UI) layer

OriginalGriff · Answer 2 · 2016-05-10T03:29:00

That's because you are storing information badly: you are storing it as a string, which means that the comparison will always be string based: the first different character determines the result of the whole comparison.
It is possible to do it if you extract the year portion as a string, and then month part as a separate string. You can then use a JOIN to a separate table to convert the short month name to a number, and then use the yera and minth values to ORDER BY.
But...it's clumsy, and a poor idea. It's also goign to be slow every time you want to access or use the field.
Instead, change the column to a DATE or DATETIME and then it's trivial:

SQL

SELECT BillDate FROM test 
ORDER BY DATEPART(yy, BillDate), DATEPART(mm, BillDate)

Member 15592727 · Answer 3 · 2022-04-06T02:55:00

Solution 3

select billdate from test ORDER BY YEAR(billdate),Month(billdate),day(billdate).

Posted 6-Apr-22 2:55am

Member 15592727

How to sort year and month order by in SQL

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