Question

Basically I have a field that can contain some prefixed strings:

word1
bla2
ttt3
word4 
[...]

I need to order SQL with for example ttt3 first and then all other string after.
I tried this with no luck

ORDER BY FIELD (myField,'ttt3',*)

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Use an ORDER BY CASE construct. It forces a 0 for the value you want to extract, and 1 for everything else, so the 0 sorts first. It just fits into the ORDER BY list like any column, comma-separated, so you can add additional sort columns afterward.

ORDER BY
  CASE WHEN myField = 'ttt3' THEN 0 ELSE 1 END,
  myField,
  other_order_col,
  other_order_col2