Sorting

$sort orders by any field of the entity, by a JSON path inside one, and by a joined relation’s field. A direction is 'asc' / 1 or 'desc' / -1, and keys order by in the order you write them:

const posts = await pool.findMany(Post, {
  $select: { title: true, publishedAt: true },
  $sort: { publishedAt: 'desc', title: 'asc' },
});

PostgreSQL

ORDER BY "publishedAt" DESC, "title"

Where nulls land

A column is nullable in UQL unless it says nullable: false, and each engine has its own idea of where those nulls belong:

Engine	Unqualified asc puts nulls
PostgreSQL, CockroachDB, Neon, PGlite, Bun SQL	last
SQLite, libSQL, Turso, D1, MySQL, MariaDB, SQL Server	first
MongoDB	first (a missing field counts as null)

So the same query answers in a different order depending on where it runs. Say which one you want, and it reads the same everywhere:

const posts = await pool.findMany(Post, {
  $sort: { publishedAt: 'descNullsLast' },
});

The four placements are ascNullsFirst, ascNullsLast, descNullsFirst and descNullsLast. They work anywhere a direction does: a field, a JSON path, a joined relation’s field, a populated relation’s own $sort, and an aggregate’s.

Each engine gets there its own way, and the result is identical:

PostgreSQL, CockroachDB, SQLite, libSQL, Turso, D1

ORDER BY "publishedAt" DESC NULLS LAST

MySQL, MariaDB

ORDER BY `publishedAt` IS NULL, `publishedAt` DESC

SQL Server

ORDER BY CASE WHEN [publishedAt] IS NULL THEN 1 ELSE 0 END, [publishedAt] DESC

MongoDB has no placement at all, so the pipeline flags each row and orders by the flag first, then takes the flag back off before you see the document.

Ask for a placement only when you need one

On the engines with no clause, a placement is an extra ORDER BY term, and no index serves an expression: a sort that was an index scan becomes a sort of the matched rows. That is why an unqualified asc is left exactly as the engine writes it, and why the placement is opt-in rather than normalized for you.

Next steps

• Relations: sorting by a joined field, and a populated collection’s own $sort.
• Counting: ordering parents by how many rows a relation holds.
• Full-text search and semantic search: ranking by relevance or vector distance.