How to Prioritize Database Rows Based on Specific Column Values?

Prioritizing Database Rows with Specific Values

In the realm of database queries, it is often desirable to retrieve rows based on specific criteria and order them in a desired manner. This may involve giving precedence to rows containing a particular value while maintaining an alphabetical ordering for the remaining rows.

Achieving Value-Based Row Prioritization

Consider the following scenario: You have a table named "Users" with columns for "id," "name," and "city." Your goal is to construct a query that first retrieves rows where the "city" column equals "New York" and then returns the remaining rows in alphabetical order based on the "city" column.

Solution

For various database systems such as SQL Server, Oracle, and DB2, you can employ the following query syntax:

ORDER BY CASE WHEN city = 'New York' THEN 1 ELSE 2 END, city

This approach uses the CASE statement to assign a priority value based on whether the "city" column value matches "New York." Rows with "New York" as their city will receive a priority value of 1, while the remaining rows will get a priority value of 2. The ORDER BY clause then sorts the output by the priority value first and then by the "city" column in ascending order.

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