Question

Ok, I have to put null values last. The query should run under Oracle and MySQL.

I’ve already came up with

ORDER BY

    CASE WHEN some_table.ord IS NULL THEN 9999999999 ELSE some_table.ord END

I should use value > max(some_table.ord) instead of 9999999999.

I think subquery to determine this value is too ugly here.

If this was C++ I can use some macro like INT_MAX for this purpose. Can you name its cross-DBMS SQL twin?

UPDATE

the question is if can I put something .. beautiful instead of 9999999999, so that query will work both in Oracle and MySQL,

not how to put null values last

Answer 1

Use an extra column for the null flag:

order by 
   case when some_table.ord is null then 2 else 1 end ,
   some_table.ord

Or, if you have enough knowledge of the values that this column can take, just hard-code a number that is larger than anything in there:

order by coalesce(some_table.ord, 9999999999)