You can use the ASC and DESC keywords to specify ascending (smallest value first) or descending (largest value first) order. The default order is ascending. For DATE and DATETIME data types, smallest means earliest in time and largest means latest in time. For character data types in the default locale, the order is the ASCII collating sequence, as listed in Collating Order for U.S. English Data.
For NCHAR or NVARCHAR data types, the localized collating order of the current session is used, if that is different from the code set order. For more information about collation, see SET COLLATION.
If you specify the ORDER BY clause, NULL values are ordered as less than values that are not NULL. Using the ASC order, a NULL value comes before any non-NULL value; using DESC order, the NULL comes last.
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