--- layout: doc_page title: "Sort groupBy Query Results" --- <!-- ~ Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one ~ or more contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file ~ distributed with this work for additional information ~ regarding copyright ownership. The ASF licenses this file ~ to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the ~ "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance ~ with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at ~ ~ http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 ~ ~ Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, ~ software distributed under the License is distributed on an ~ "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY ~ KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the ~ specific language governing permissions and limitations ~ under the License. --> # Sort groupBy Query Results The limitSpec field provides the functionality to sort and limit the set of results from a groupBy query. If you group by a single dimension and are ordering by a single metric, we highly recommend using [TopN Queries](../querying/topnquery.html) instead. The performance will be substantially better. Available options are: ### DefaultLimitSpec The default limit spec takes a limit and the list of columns to do an orderBy operation over. The grammar is: ```json { "type" : "default", "limit" : <integer_value>, "columns" : [list of OrderByColumnSpec], } ``` #### OrderByColumnSpec OrderByColumnSpecs indicate how to do order by operations. Each order-by condition can be a `jsonString` or a map of the following form: ```json { "dimension" : "<Any dimension or metric name>", "direction" : <"ascending"|"descending">, "dimensionOrder" : <"lexicographic"(default)|"alphanumeric"|"strlen"|"numeric"> } ``` If only the dimension is provided (as a JSON string), the default order-by is ascending with lexicographic sorting. See [Sorting Orders](./sorting-orders.html) for more information on the sorting orders specified by "dimensionOrder".