Question

I have a very simple requirement.

SELECT NULL as ProjectId, 'All' as ProjectName

UNION

(
  SELECT  Project.ProjectId,  Project.ProjectName
  FROM Project Order by 2
)

Original order of entries:

ProjectId       ProjectName     
 24               Beta           
 56               Alpha          
 57               Gamma          
 120              Aap            

EXPECTED Result SET:

ProjectId      ProjectName         
______________________________
NULL           All                 
120            Aap                 
56             Alpha               
24             Beta                
57             Gamma              

What I Need: I want to add a single row on top of the ordered result set of a query

Problems:

1. Subquerys are not allowed to have Order By clause
2. Doing Top 100 Percent destroys the order, and row having ‘All’ doesn’t come at top

3. Declaring a Table variable inserting all entries in order and then performing union on this table
   i.e.

    Select NULL as ProjectId, 'All' as ProjectName...
     UNION
    select * from @myTable
   

   again destroys the order

help me please

Answer 1

You can order result of UNION, but you need to provide additional column to identify where the data came from – here it is SortOrder:

SELECT NULL as ProjectId, 'All' as ProjectName, 1 SortOrder
UNION ALL
SELECT  Project.ProjectId,  Project.ProjectName, 2 SortOrder
FROM Project
order by SortOrder, ProjectName

Note I replaced UNION with UNION ALL as you do not need to DISTINCT result set.