I am newbie to MySQL. I wonder if there is a way to sort the table in certain order. It seems to me that "order by" can only be used to sort the query result, not the table itself. How to sort the table itself?

Many thanks

Please anyone out there correct me if I'm wrong, but the way to "order" or "Sort" your tables while they are stored on disk is with Indexes. By creating indexes you allow your data to be found much quicker than if there were no indexing. Here is a page from www.mysql.com about how indexes are treated and created.

http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/MySQL_indexes.html

smith, you're on the right track, but tables are not stored in any order, no matter whether they have indexes or not

in fact, indexes are stored separately from the tables they index

even with what's called a clustering index, which mysql doesn't seem to support, you are still not guaranteed to store the rows in any particular order

besides, it doesn't matter -- you'll never get to see the rows of a table unless you use a SELECT, and if you use a SELECT and want to see the rows in a particular order, then you need to use ORDER BY

simple, innit


rudy

Nope... You have to use ORDER BY to order it... Even if the database would store the rows in order, you would have to dela with updates, deletes and free block inserts... The only way to order is to use ORDER BY...