Question

I have a small problem. I’m populating a select tag with results from a SQL database. What I would like to have is the last one added as the top entry and the rest sorted alphabetically.

So it would return:

*----------*-------------* developerID|developerName *----------*-------------* | 40       | ZZZ Dev     | | 39       | A Dev       | | 38       | Be New Dev  | *----------*-------------* 

Currently it just selects all the entries in descending order:

'SELECT developerName, developerID FROM developer ORDER BY developerID DESC' 

Which is fine, but not as usable as I would like.

Is what I want possible using pure MySQL?

Answer 1

Assuming the column defining when the developer was added is developerAdded (a timestamp of some sort):

SELECT developerName, developerID, 1 AS ordering     FROM developer     WHERE developerAdded =  (SELECT MAX(developerAdded)                                 FROM developer) UNION SELECT developerName, developerID, 2 AS ordering     FROM developer     WHERE developerAdded != (SELECT MAX(developerAdded)                                 FROM developer) ORDER BY ordering, developername; 

If there’s some other magic way to determine the most recently added developer (e.g. maximum developerID), adjust the sub-queries accordingly.

Note that this query works OK even if several developers satisfy the ‘most recently added’ criterion; they appear in alphabetic order before the developers who’ve been around longer.

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Since the most recently added developer has the maximum developerID, the revised query should be:

SELECT developerName, developerID, 1 AS ordering     FROM developer     WHERE developerID =  (SELECT MAX(developerID) FROM developer) UNION SELECT developerName, developerID, 2 AS ordering     FROM developer     WHERE developerID != (SELECT MAX(developerID) FROM developer) ORDER BY ordering, developername;