Question

My table has two columns which I need to sort by:

content title

Only some rows have data in the content column but all have some in the title column. I need to sort these rows so that those with data in the content column are first. I can do this by:

ORDER BY content DESC, title ASC

However, those top rows returned because of their content column also need to be sorted alphabetically by their title (not by their content which I assume is happening).

Ideas? Thanks.

Update:

Should have noted that title is a VARCHAR and content is TEXT. So arbitary text. content column is empty if no content, not NULL.

So for example:

`title`     `content`
title a
title b      this has content
title c      so does this
title d

The order would be:

title c
title b
title a
title d

Answer 1

If I understand what you need, try this:

SELECT * FROM your_table
ORDER BY
  CASE
    WHEN content IS NULL THEN 1
    ELSE 0
  END
  ,content,title