How do you sort employees by hire_date descending?

• A. SELECT * FROM employees ORDER BY hire_date DESC;
• B. SELECT * FROM employees ORDER BY hire_date ASC;
• C. SELECT * FROM employees ORDER BY hire_date;
• D. SELECT * FROM employees SORT BY hire_date DESC;

Answer: (A)

Sorting results by a column is done with ORDER BY. To get the most recently hired employees first, use DESC for descending order. So, to list employees from newest hire date to oldest, the query is SELECT * FROM employees ORDER BY hire_date DESC;. This returns all columns for each employee, but ordered from the latest hire date to the earliest.

Using ASC would flip the order to oldest first, omitting the direction defaults to ascending in many databases, and SORT BY isn’t valid SQL syntax.