排序SQL查询而不是表

Question

I have a database containing a large amount of information that a user can query using PHP to communicate with the MySQL database. I also want to limit their results to be at most 300 results, which I have successfully done. However, I also want to sort the results by dataset name. Is there a way to sort the end query, not the original table? From what I've read online, the ORDER BY statement in a query sorts the whole table and then does the query (or something similar) Sorting the query would be more efficient, as you would only be sorting say 15 records instead of 1500000. If it helps at all, I print the results to the page using the following syntax:

while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
...
}

Thanks

Answer 1

To create a sub table and only sort on that you could attempt something like:

Select * from ( QUERY limit 300) a order by COLUMN