Question

I have a pretty simple question: Is it possible to order the rows retrieved according to the which condition is met?
For example, I have a table of people, and I want to retrieve all people whose names begin with an “I”, or end with an “ster”, or contain “lo”, ordered according to which condition of these is met. First the rows that match the first condition, then the rows that match the second, and so on. (Without duplicated: if a row meets the first condition, it shouldn’t show again for the second condition)

Edit:
I work with Visual C#, and I manage the DB with MS Access. (The file format is .mdb, if that matters)

Thank you =)

Answer 1

Something like this ought to work:

SELECT * FROM people
ORDER BY
  CASE WHEN name LIKE "I%" THEN 0
    WHEN name LIKE "%ster" THEN 1
    WHEN name LIKE "%lo%" THEN 2
    ELSE 3
  END ASC;

In Access you may have to resort to nested IIF()s though:

ORDER BY
  IIF( name LIKE "I%",     0,
  IIF( name LIKE "%ster%", 1,
  IIF( name LIKE "%lo%",   2,
    3
  ) ) ) ASC