Question

I commonly use a construct somewhat like:

ORDER BY CASE WHEN Location = 'ROOT' THEN '~' ELSE Location END

In an ASCII environment this successfully pushes all records with a Location of ROOT down to the end while all others are sorted normally. This works because the ‘~’ character is close to the end of the character set. However, with the more ubiquitous use of databases with wider characters sets than ASCII I expect this technique will occasionally not work.

What alternative is there? Specifically I want a technique that will push records with a specific value in a field to the end of the list.

I am working primarily with MS SQL but I would also be interested in a general technique and one that will work with Oracle.

Answer 1

To push the values with Location = 'ROOT' to the end try this:

ORDER BY CASE WHEN Location = 'ROOT' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END, Location