Question

Here’s a simplified version of a table I have:

sometable
title  |  tag   | score
-----------------------
foo1      bar       100
bar2      oobar      50
meh3                 25

Currently, If I want to search the table and have oo be my search query, I’d execute something like:

SELECT *, (title||" "||tag) AS titletag
FROM sometable WHERE titletag LIKE "%oo%"
ORDER BY score DESC

and the above would return the foo1 row first, and bar2 second.

What I’d like to add in, is if the search query (oo) matches the start of a tag (eg tag LIKE "oo%"), I want said rows to come first before any other row, regardless of score, but still retain the rest of the original query.

So by searching for oo, I’d want the bar2 row returned first since oo matches the start of oobar, and then have foo1 come second, even though bar2‘s score is lower than foo1‘s.

How can I achieve this?

Answer 1

VMAtm’s answer didn’t quite work but gave me an idea to use:

SELECT *, (title||" "||tag) AS titletag, score*100 AS newscore
FROM sometable WHERE tag LIKE "oo%"

UNION

SELECT *, (title||" "||tag) AS titletag, score AS newscore
FROM sometable WHERE titletag LIKE "%oo%"

ORDER BY newscore DESC

This way, in the first SELECT term, matching tags are assigned a much higher score, and in the second SELECT term their scores stay the same.

So bar2 would come first with a newscore of 5000, and foo1 comes second because its newscore stays at 100.