Question

I would just like to ask about a problem that I have with my query/queries. For example I have the following result from a query which is a union of 4 queries:

alpha,alpha,alpha,bravo,bravo,bravo,charlie,charlie,charlie,delta,delta,delta

what do I need to do to have the order of the result to:

alpha, bravo, charlie, delta, alpha, bravo, charlie, delta, alpha, bravo, charlie, delta?

I apologize if this question might have already been answered before here in stackoverflow as I don’t know the proper keywords for this problem for me to search the database. Any help would be very much appreciated, thanks!

Answer 1

You can have a new column something like a sortorder:

SELECT *
FROM
(
   SELECT acolumn, 1 AS sortorder FROM table1
   UNION ALL
   SELECT acolumn, 2              FROM table2
   UNION ALL
   SELECT acolumn, 3              FROM table3
   UNION ALL
   SELECT acolumn, 4              FROM table4
) u
ORDER BY aColumn, sortorder;