Question

This sounds like a stupid question while I’m asking it, but I’m new to SQL and not sure if something like this is possible.

I want to select all records from a table except for 2, order them alphabetically and then append the last two to the end. Can I do this in a select statement or do I have to create a temp table and returned a result set from that?

Basically, in pseudo-code, I want to do this:

select
  firstname,
  lastname, 
  otherdata
  from People
    where firstname != 'john' or 'mark'
      order by firstname
  add John and Mark

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

No, you need to use a UNION to combine queries and ORDER BY must come last. e.g.

SELECT firstname, lastname, otherdata
 FROM dbo.People
 WHERE firstname NOT IN ('john', 'mark')
UNION ALL
SELECT 'John', NULL, NULL
UNION ALL 
SELECT 'Mark', NULL, NULL
ORDER BY firstname;

If your intention is to place those two rows last, then you need something else to order by, e.g.

SELECT firstname, lastname, otherdata, z = 1
 FROM dbo.People
 WHERE firstname NOT IN ('john', 'mark')
UNION ALL
SELECT 'John', NULL, NULL, z = 2
UNION ALL 
SELECT 'Mark', NULL, NULL, z = 3
ORDER BY z, firstname;

You might see cute tricks where people will put the query in a subquery and apply an order by there (with the help of TOP), but beware, this is a ruse! This will not guarantee how the outer query is ordered.