Question

I’ve had a look around and I have found a few questions like mine but they lack an explanation.

I’m trying to search a table with multiple columns. I want to have the rows with the highest number of match columns at the top and the ones with the least at the bottom. I’ve seen a few ways of doing. My current and awful way is with lots of MySQLs querys and PHP doing the work.

Example

    +----+-----------+----------+------+-------+
    | ID | firstName | lastName | more | stuff |
    +----+-----------+----------+------+-------+
    |  1 | Bob       | Hope     |    1 |   450 |
    |  2 | Steve     | Hope     |    0 |    29 |
    |  3 | Gary      | Flops    |    1 |     8 |
    +----+-----------+----------+------+-------+

I want to be able to search for lastName = Hope OR more = 1
I would like Bob Hope to be at the top because he matches two of the requested things. I know in this example this is what will happen but this is just an example.

If I query; lastName = Hope OR firstName = Steve. Steve should be at the top followed by Bob

I hope this is easy to understand.
Can some give me a detailed example with explanation.

Answer 1

How about this:

SELECT
  id,
  firstName,
  lastName,
  more,
  stuff,
  (lastName = 'Hope') + (firstName = 'Steve') AS weight
FROM mytable
ORDER BY weight DESC;

Result:

+----+-----------+----------+------+-------+--------+
| id | firstName | lastName | more | stuff | weight |
+----+-----------+----------+------+-------+--------+
|  2 | Steve     | Hope     |    0 |    29 |      2 |
|  1 | Bob       | Hope     |    1 |   450 |      1 |
|  3 | Gary      | Flops    |    1 |     8 |      0 |
+----+-----------+----------+------+-------+--------+