Question

Im trying to get a result set that contains the 10 values that are closest to, in this case, the number 3.

I have a database that has values in a column named rated which can be 1,2,3,4 or 5. What im trying to do is query the database and return the first 10 rows that have the values closest to 3. The values can be above 3 or below 3. I should note that these values in the rated column are floats.

I then need to sort these rows in order so that rows with value of 3 are first and then the row with lowest offset (+/-) from 3.

Is there any SQL query that can return atleast the result set of values closest to 3 ? or am i going to have to return the whole db and sort it myself?

To get the first 10 rows with highest value down i used the statement

SELECT * FROM tabs ORDER BY 5 DESC LIMIT 10";

5 refers to the column rated

Is there some way to modify this to do what i want ?
Thanks

Answer 1

If I understand your problem correctly, this should do the trick:

select *
from tabs
order by abs(`rated` - 3) asc
limit 10

Note that it sorts by the difference in ascending order, so those with a difference of 0 will come first.