Question

I have a table that is a list of countries, with two fields, ID (int) and country_name. I need to write a query that can pull an alphabetical list of countries, but with the United States record at the top. How can I do this? assume that the id of the united states record = 100.

Answer 1

select * 
  from country
 order by case when id = 100 then 0 else 1 end, country_name

Extra note.

This solution differs from the other suggested in some ways

• The UNION way. The default behavior of UNION is to remove duplicates, this may or may not be desired (Unions in MySQL). Also unless id is indexed you will have twice the execution time
• The “Select something and do sorting on it” is nice, but returns extra data and depending on the receiving framework this might not be desired.