Question

I have a MySQL select statment and want to make this into one query.

 select * from users where...

The where clause will have four parts, and they need to be ordered this way:

 1. where description = "query"

 2. where description = "%query%"

 3. where description = "q1" or description = "q2"

 4. where description = "%q1%" or description = "%q2%"

Answer 1

One solution would be to UNION the results and add a fake OrderBy field for each query.

SELECT   1 as OrderBy, *
FROM     users
WHERE    description = "query"
UNION ALL
SELECT   2 as OrderBy, *
FROM     users
WHERE    description = "%query%"
...
ORDER BY
         OrderBy