How Can I Customize Sorting Order in MySQL's ORDER BY Clause for Specific Values?

Customizing Order in MySQL ORDER BY Clause

When sorting data in MySQL, the ORDER BY clause allows you to customize the sorting order beyond the default ascending or descending options. One common challenge is defining a specific sorting precedence for multiple values within a column.

Question:

Consider the following table:

ID	Language	Text
0	ENU	a
0	JPN	b
0	DAN	c
1	ENU	d
1	JPN	e
1	DAN	f

How can we sort this table by Language (ENU first, JPN second, DAN last) and then by ascending ID?

Answer:

MySQL provides the FIELD() function that enables custom sorting orders. It takes a value and checks its position within a specified list. Using this function, we can define the desired sorting precedence as follows:

ORDER BY FIELD(Language, 'ENU', 'JPN', 'DAN'), ID

This query will return the data in the following order:

a, d, b, e, c, f, etc.

Considerations:

1. FIELD() can reduce SQL portability as other DBMSs may not support it.
2. For long lists of values, consider creating a separate table with a sort order column and joining it to the query for sorting.

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