Question

I have the table ‘category’ with two columns: ‘id’ and ‘name’.

I Want to display the names and order the table by alphabet, but if the name “other” is present, i want to set it to be the last row.

Is there a way to achieve this without creating another column that marks the position?

ORDER BY name DESC { something to set name = "other" to the end }

THANKS!

Answer 1

Using a CASE, you can apply ordering conditionally in the ORDER BY. Rows where name <> 'other' are conditionally assigned a 0 which sorts ahead of those matching other which are assigned a 1. Then it is sub-ordered by name.

ORDER BY
  CASE WHEN name <> 'other' THEN 0 ELSE 1 END,
  name ASC

You use name DESC in your example, but your description implies you want it sorted in ascending alphabetical order. If that is incorrect and you do want it descending, use name DESC instead.

Note that for MySQL, the boolean expression (name = 'other') will evaluate to a 0 or 1. So this can be simplified to omit the CASE:

ORDER BY
  /* name <> 'other' returns 0 */
  (name = 'other'),
  name ASC

This is not portable to any RDBMS though.