Some DBMS can reference columns in ORDER BY and GROUP BY by their sequential numbers. ORDER BY is supported in all the dialects except for Cassandra, ClickHouse, Hive, Spark, and HSQLDB. GROUP BY is supported in MySQL, Maria, PostgreSQL (and its subdialects), Exasol, SQLite, and Snowflake.

Example (PostgreSQL):

CREATE TABLE tab(a INT, b INT);
SELECT * FROM tab ORDER BY 1;

You can replace 1 in the SELECT query with a column name by using this intention action. So, after the intention action is applied, the query looks as follows.

SELECT * FROM tab ORDER BY a;