Question

Hey i have a query ordered by date, and i want in case the date is identical to order by time added to maintain stable results.

I have the following query :

    (
SELECT  'album' AS RowType, id, DATE, title, time_added
FROM albums
WHERE is_temp =0
AND subject_id =  '3'
)
UNION ALL (

SELECT  'video' AS RowType, id, DATE, title, time_added
FROM videos
WHERE is_temp =0
AND subject_id =  '3'
)
UNION ALL (

SELECT  'story' AS RowType, id, DATE, title, time_added
FROM stories
WHERE is_temp =0
AND subject_id =  '3'
)
ORDER BY DATE, time_added

Which works perfectly but i don’t want to select the time_added column as i don’t need it in my result set.

Can i somehow achive this? if i remove the time_added the query won’t run.

I have found the following :

The ORDER BY clause causes the output rows to be sorted.
The argument to ORDER BY is a list of expressions that are used as the
key for the sort. The expressions do not have to be part of the result
for a simple SELECT, but in a compound SELECT each sort expression
must exactly match one of the result columns. Each sort expression may
be optionally followed by a COLLATE keyword and the name of a
collating function used for ordering text and/or keywords ASC or DESC
to specify the sort order.

Which i can’t decide if means it’s impossible or i should try harder.

Answer 1

try this

SELECT RowType
    , id
    , DATE
    , title
FROM 
(
    SELECT 'album' AS RowType , id , DATE , title , time_added
    FROM albums
    WHERE is_temp = 0 AND subject_id = '3'

    UNION ALL

    SELECT 'video' AS RowType , id , DATE , title , time_added
    FROM videos
    WHERE is_temp = 0 AND subject_id = '3'

    UNION ALL

    SELECT 'story' AS RowType , id , DATE , title , time_added
    FROM stories
    WHERE is_temp = 0 AND subject_id = '3'

) s
ORDER BY DATE , time_added