What is the purpose of Order By 1 in SQL select statement?

Question

I\'m reading through some old code at work, and have noticed that there are several views with an order by 1 clause. What does this accomplish?

Exampl

Answer 1

As mentioned in other answers ORDER BY 1 orders by the first column.

I came across another example of where you might use it though. We have certain queries which need to be ordered select the same column. You would get a SQL error if ordering by Name in the below.

SELECT Name, Name FROM Segment ORDER BY 1