Documentation

ORDER BY clause

Use the ORDER BY clause to sort data by time in ascending or descending order. InfluxQL only supports sorting data by time.

Syntax

SELECT_clause FROM_clause [WHERE_clause] [GROUP_BY_clause] ORDER BY time [ASC|DESC]
  • If the the ORDER BY clause is not included, the default behavior is to sort data by time in ascending order: ORDER BY time ASC.
  • If the query includes WHERE and GROUP BY clauses, the ORDER BY clause must come after these clauses.

Sort orders

  • ASC (ascending): The first row in the results has the oldest timestamp. The last row in the results has the most recent timestamp.
  • DESC (descending): The first row in the results has the most recent timestamp. The last row in the results has the oldest timestamp.

Examples

The following examples use the Home sensor sample data.

Sort data with the oldest points first

Sort data with the newest points first


Was this page helpful?

Thank you for your feedback!


New in InfluxDB 3.6

Key enhancements in InfluxDB 3.6 and the InfluxDB 3 Explorer 1.4.

See the Blog Post

InfluxDB 3.6 is now available for both Core and Enterprise. This release introduces the 1.4 update to InfluxDB 3 Explorer, featuring the beta launch of Ask AI, along with new capabilities for simple startup and expanded functionality in the Processing Engine.

For more information, check out:

InfluxDB Docker latest tag changing to InfluxDB 3 Core

On February 3, 2026, the latest tag for InfluxDB Docker images will point to InfluxDB 3 Core. To avoid unexpected upgrades, use specific version tags in your Docker deployments.

If using Docker to install and run InfluxDB, the latest tag will point to InfluxDB 3 Core. To avoid unexpected upgrades, use specific version tags in your Docker deployments. For example, if using Docker to run InfluxDB v2, replace the latest version tag with a specific version tag in your Docker pull command–for example:

docker pull influxdb:2

InfluxDB Cloud Serverless