Brajesh Singh Bhadoriya

 Profile Answers by Brajesh Singh Bhadoriya 

• Apr 19th, 2007

 

Describe command is used to describe the data defination of a schema object.
Desc is abbreviation of Describe.
for example: describe <object_name> and desc <object_name> aer same.
But when this "desc" is used with an order by clause in the sql query then this desc used to order the records in descending order.

Regards,
Brajesh :)

KiranKW

 Profile Answers by KiranKW 

• May 2nd, 2007

 

DESC and DESCRIBE are all same ... abbreivation of DESCRIBE is given as DESC. This command is used to describe

   DESC table

   DESC view

   DESC synonym

   DESC function

   DESC package

Sebastian Thomas

• Aug 17th, 2007

 

DESC will display the values in DESCending order when used in an ORDER BY clause.

For example:

SELECT * FROM emp
ORDER BY empno DESC;

ashishdixit

 Profile Answers by ashishdixit 

• May 29th, 2008

 

desc has two meanings and depends on the usage.
when used in sql plus as in the below stt.
desc <tablename>;
it is taken as a sqlplus keyword and describes the table, dispalying column, constraints and data type for each column.

an alternative is when the same keyword is described in an order by clause. In this case, it stands for descending and displays the result set in descending order of the column/columns specified in the order by  clause.
e.g.
select ename from emp
order by empno desc;
the enames in this case are sorted in descending order.

conclusion: desc may mean different as it is both a sql key word as well as a sqlplus key word.