Question

I have a conditional query as such:

• If a column (order) is not 0, order by value 1 to 99999 (max)
• I need to order all 0s in order by last name.

So if I have a table as such

ID   Order     Last Name
1     0        Manner
2     1        Brock
3     0        Lester
4     0        Annual
5     0        Greatly

The results I expect are:

Brock
Annual
Greatly
Lester
Manner

Here is my query. What is happening every time is that I am getting last name sort, without the non-order 0 going first:

select c.last_name
from person_reports crt 
join person c 
where c.org_id = 1000 and crt.reports_to_id = 100389 and c.id = crt.contact_id 
order by c.last_name, case preference_num when 0 then 9999999 else preference_num end

Results of my current work:

Annual
Brock
Greatly
Lester
Manner

Thanks for any help

Answer 1

You can simply reverse the ORDER BY clause to:

order by case preference_num when 0 then 9999999 else preference_num end, c.last_name

And you can avoid using the magic ‘9999999’ if you add one more segment at the beginning:

order by case preference_num when 0 then 1 else 0 end, preference_num, c.last_name