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Asked: 2026-05-10T16:53:20+00:00

Is there an elegant way to have performant, natural sorting in a MySQL database?

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Is there an elegant way to have performant, natural sorting in a MySQL database?

For example if I have this data set:

  • Final Fantasy
  • Final Fantasy 4
  • Final Fantasy 10
  • Final Fantasy 12
  • Final Fantasy 12: Chains of Promathia
  • Final Fantasy Adventure
  • Final Fantasy Origins
  • Final Fantasy Tactics

Any other elegant solution than to split up the games’ names into their components

  • Title: ‘Final Fantasy’
  • Number: ’12’
  • Subtitle: ‘Chains of Promathia’

to make sure that they come out in the right order? (10 after 4, not before 2).

Doing so is a pain in the a** because every now and then there’s another game that breaks that mechanism of parsing the game title (e.g. ‘Warhammer 40,000’, ‘James Bond 007’)

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1 Answer

  1. I think this is why a lot of things are sorted by release date.

    A solution could be to create another column in your table for the ‘SortKey’. This could be a sanitized version of the title which conforms to a pattern you create for easy sorting or a counter.

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