Comments on: MySQL Sorting

Question: MySQL Sorting

kirkaracha — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 13:48:04 -0800

Can I combine and sort MySQL search results?

I'm making an A-Z list of university departments. They're in a table with fields like this:

dept_name: Department of Engineering
alt_dept_name: Engineering Department

dept_name: Department of English
alt_dept_name: English Department

I can do a query that gets me every entry that has either dept_name or alt_dept_name that starts with a given letter. How can I combine the dept_names and alt_dept_names so they're sorted alphabetically together?

By: zeoslap

zeoslap — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 13:54:53 -0800

union should do it

By: zeoslap

zeoslap — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 13:58:16 -0800

(select dept_name as a from depts)
union
(select alt_dept a from depts)
order by a

By: flabdablet

flabdablet — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 18:16:40 -0800

Personally, I'd use a numeric dept_ID field in the table that currently has your dept_name and alt_dept_name fields, and have a second table with dept_ID and dept_name fields in it. That way, not only would your departments be able to have an arbitrary number of names, but your queries would be more straightforward.

This won't be the last time you need to query as if dept_name and alt_dept_name were actually the same field. Best to make them so.

By: orthogonality

orthogonality — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:04:24 -0800

What zeoslap said.