Question

I have query like this

SELECT user_id FROM user_rights ORDER BY user_id DESC;

Why it gives me those messed up numbers?

USER_ID
4
4
4
4
3
3
21
21
21
21
21
21
20
20

It does not order the numbers as expected.

PROOF : http://sqlfiddle.com/#!2/c753a/1

I understand that they may be ordered alphabetically or numerical, buy i don’t understand why is this result so weird…

Answer 1

It’s because the user_id is not numeric.

TRY this,

SELECT user_id 
FROM user_rights 
ORDER BY CAST(user_id as SIGNED) DESC;

SQLFiddle Demo

Another solution is to change the datatype of your column user_id to int