Question

Here is my problem. I have a select statement something like this:

select * from mytable where mycol like '%finance%'

The results look something like this:

id  mycol 
16  the finance department 
 8  i like the finance people 
43  chief finance officer 
22  finance 
68  finance trading

I would like to have the order come out like so:

id  mycol 
22  finance 
68  finance trading 
43  chief finance officer 
16  the finance department 
 8  i like the finance people

In essence, to have the select query use:

where mycol = 'finance'

then

where mycol = 'finance%'

then

where mycol = '%finance%'

1) I cannot use the id column for ordering purposes.

2) My query is far more complex than this (it’s part of a paging a recordset on a large db using SELECT TOP 1000000 ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY t.category, t.sequence) …

I’m thinking I might need to use UNION or RANK() or something, but I’m getting out of my league now. Any guidance greatly appreciated 🙂

Answer 1

One obvious solution:

Select Id, mycol
    , Case
        When mycol = 'finance' Then 1 
        When mycol Like 'finance%' Then 2
        When mycol Like '%finance%' Then 3
        End As Rnk
From MyTable
Where mycol Like '%finance%' 
Order By Rnk

Granted, this won’t perform well with the leading and trailing wildcard. Another way would be to use full-text search which will give you a relevancy rank.

CONTAINSTABLE (Transact-SQL)