A SQL select group by, order by, and count query

As a note to self, this is how I wrote a “group by” and “order by” SQL query that gives me the number of times each country code occurs in a database table named url_clicks:

select country, count(1) as the_count
from url_clicks
where url_id=6
and country != ''
group by country
order by the_count desc

Results of this query look like this:

US, 50
CA, 30
GB, 15

That tells me that 50 people in the US clicked on the link with the id=6, 30 people from CA clicked on the same link, and 15 people from GB clicked on that link as well.

I can never remember the SQL syntax for a group-by, order-by query where I get the sorted count of the number of unique occurrences of each group-by field, so I’m putting this out here so I can remember the syntax in the future.