Question

I am having some problems and I’m sure it’s something stupid.

So I have a query like

SELECT name, id, xyz FROM table ORDER BY ?

then later down the road setting the ? doing a

ps.setString(1, "xyz");

I am outputting the query and the value of xyz in the console. When I loop through the ResultSet returned from the PreparedStatement the values are not in the correct order. They are in the returned order as if I had left the ORDER BY clause off. When I copy/paste the query and the value into TOAD it runs and comes back correctly.

Any ideas to why the ResultSet is not coming back in the correct order?

Answer 1

The database will see the query as

SELECT name, id, xyz FROM table ORDER BY 'xyz'

That is to say, order by a constant expression (the string ‘xyz’ in this case). Any order will satisfy that.