Use Argument Indexes

In Postgres, each of the arguments you specify in a select statement has a 1-based index tied to it. You can use these indexes in the order by and group by parts of the statement.

Instead of writing

select id, updated_at from posts order by updated_at;

you can write

select id, updated_at from posts order by 2;

If you want to group by a table's type and then order by the counts from highest to lowest, you can do the following

select type, count(*) from transaction group by 1 order by 2 desc;