ORDER BY in queries

Reports usages when the ORDER BY clause is used without TOP, OFFSET, or FOR XML in views, inline functions, derived tables, subqueries, and common table expressions.

For more information about usages of ORDER BY, see SELECT - ORDER BY Clause (Transact-SQL) at docs.microsoft.com.

Example (Microsoft SQL server):

CREATE TABLE foo (a INT NOT NULL, b  INT NOT NULL);

SELECT *
FROM (SELECT a, b
FROM foo A
WHERE a < 89
ORDER BY b) ALIAS;

In a subquery, ORDER BY will be highlighted as an error. You can add TOP, OFFSET, or FOR XML to a subquery. Alternatively, use the Delete element quick-fix to delete the ORDER BY section.

After the quick-fix is applied:

SELECT *
FROM (SELECT a, b
FROM foo A
WHERE a < 89) ALIAS;

Locating this inspection

By ID

Can be used to locate inspection in e.g. Qodana configuration files, where you can quickly enable or disable it, or adjust its settings.

MsOrderBy

Via Settings dialog

Path to the inspection settings via IntelliJ Platform IDE Settings dialog, when you need to adjust inspection settings directly from your IDE.

Settings or Preferences | Editor | Inspections | SQL server

Inspection ID: MsOrderByInspection

Suppressing Inspection

You can suppress this inspection by placing the following comment marker before the code fragment where you no longer want messages from this inspection to appear:

//noinspection MsOrderBy

More detailed instructions as well as other ways and options that you have can be found in the product documentation:

Inspection Details
By default bundled with:	CLion 2025.2, DataGrip 2025.2, DataSpell 2025.2, GoLand 2025.2, IntelliJ IDEA 2025.2, JetBrains Rider 2025.2, PhpStorm 2025.2, PyCharm 2025.2, Qodana for .NET 2025.2, Qodana for Go 2025.2, Qodana for JS 2025.2, Qodana for JVM 2025.2, Qodana for PHP 2025.2, Qodana for Ruby 2025.2, RubyMine 2025.2, WebStorm 2025.2

Last modified: 18 September 2025