Sort

Let’s get the most popular movies in the dataset by sorting.

Ordering the data

1. Assuming you are following along with the tutorial, go to the pivot1 table. Click on the icon in the top right of the counta(userId) column and select Sort.

2. In the right-hand sort menu that appears, select for the Order to be Descending so that the highest values appear at the top.

3. As usual, click Apply to run the calculation. When it’s done, you should see classic famous movies at the top, like Forrest Gump and Shawshank Redemption.

Sorting can take longer to run

Sorting can require a lot of time when there are millions of rows. In the example above there are only ~59K rows in the pivot table, so it’s nearly instantaneous. But if we were to try to sort the ratings table with ~25M rows it would likely take longer. For example, on a base 2024 Mac mini that costs $599, sorting the ratings table alphabetically by movieTitle takes ~10 seconds. On less powerful computers it may take ~30-60 seconds.