Question

All right, so here’s a challenge for all you SQL pros:
I have a table with two columns of interest, group and birthdate. Only some rows have a group assigned to them.
I now want to print all rows sorted by birthdate, but I also want all rows with the same group to end up next to each other. The only semi-sensible way of doing this would be to use the groups’ average birthdates for all the rows in the group when sorting. The question is, can this be done with pure SQL (MySQL in this instance), or will some scripting logic be required?

To illustrate, with the given table:

id | group | birthdate
---+-------+-----------
1  | 1     | 1989-12-07
2  | NULL  | 1990-03-14
3  | 1     | 1987-05-25
4  | NULL  | 1985-09-29
5  | NULL  | 1988-11-11

and let’s say that the “average” of 1987-05-25 and 1989-12-07 is 1988-08-30 (this can be found by averaging the UNIX timestamp equivalents of the dates and then converting back to a date. This average doesn’t have to be completely correct!).
The output should then be:

id | group | birthdate  | [sort_by_birthdate]
---+-------+------------+--------------------
4  | NULL  | 1985-09-29 | 1985-09-29
3  | 1     | 1987-05-25 | 1988-08-30
1  | 1     | 1989-12-07 | 1988-08-30
5  | NULL  | 1988-11-11 | 1988-11-11
2  | NULL  | 1990-03-14 | 1990-03-14

Any ideas?

Cheers,
Jon

Answer 1

I normally program in T-SQL, so please forgive me if I don’t translate the date functions perfectly to MySQL:

SELECT
    T.id,
    T.group
FROM
    Some_Table T
LEFT OUTER JOIN (
    SELECT
        group,
        '1970-01-01' +
            INTERVAL AVG(DATEDIFF('1970-01-01', birthdate)) DAY AS avg_birthdate
    FROM
        Some_Table T2
    GROUP BY
        group
    ) SQ ON SQ.group = T.group
ORDER BY
    COALESCE(SQ.avg_birthdate, T.birthdate),
    T.group