Question

Say I have the following table:

ID      Author
---------------------
1       Bill
2       Joe
3       Bill and Joe
4       Bill

And I want a result set that would come from:

SELECT id FROM table WHERE Author LIKE '%Bill%' OR Author = 'Bill'

How could I order it so that the rows matched with equality are the first rows returned and the like matches comes after? e.g. The query would return 1,4,3. I am using MySQL but would take answers in any DB.

Answer 1

SELECT  id
FROM    YourTable
WHERE  Author LIKE '%Bill%' 
ORDER BY CASE WHEN Author = 'Bill' THEN 0
              ELSE 1
         END 

You can probably just do ORDER BY Author != 'Bill' as well – Not sure about ordering by boolean expressions in MySQL.