Question

Having:

SELECT DISTINCT TOP 100 * FROM mytable ORDER BY date ASC

How can I make the nulls in date go last?

Thanks a lot.

Answer 1

Some databases support a syntax for NULLs last in an order by and some do not. So, I use:

select distinct top 100 *
from MyTable
order by  (case when date is null then 1 else 0 end), date asc

Or, if I don’t want to type so much:

order by coalesce(date, '9999-12-12')  -- or something like that

You can also put the distinct in a subquery:

select top 100 *
from (select distinct *
      from mytable
     ) t
order by (case when date is null then 1 else 0 end), date asc

Assuming that date is in the column list, however, the first version should work.