How to group and then sort in MySQL?

Question

MySQL

There is a table with products, the table has a column manufacturer, you need to group

SELECT manufacturer FROM items GROUP BY manufacturer ORDER BY manufacturer DESC

I receive the grouped but very strangely sorted list not alphabetically.

I tried to do it like this:

SELECT * FROM (SELECT manufacturer FROM tech_catalog_catalog1_items GROUP BY manufacturer) a ORDER BY a.manufacturer DESC

The result is the same :( What am I not so wishing for?

Answer 1

Base, table, field encoding? Sorting is in the order specified in the encoding.

Answer 2

What type of field are you sorting by? What is the field length?