MySQL Cookbook

Sorting Subsets of a Table

Problem

You don’t want to sort an entire table, just part of it.

Solution

Add a WHERE clause that selects only the records you want to see.

Discussion

ORDER BY doesn’t care how many rows there are; it sorts whatever rows the query returns. If you don’t want to sort an entire table, add a WHERE clause to indicate which rows to select. For example, to sort the records for just one of the drivers, do something like this:

mysql> SELECT trav_date, miles FROM driver_log WHERE name = 'Henry'
    -> ORDER BY trav_date;
+------------+-------+
| trav_date  | miles |
+------------+-------+
| 2001-11-26 |   115 |
| 2001-11-27 |    96 |
| 2001-11-29 |   300 |
| 2001-11-30 |   203 |
| 2001-12-01 |   197 |
+------------+-------+

Columns named in the ORDER BY clause need not be the same as those in the WHERE clause, as the preceding query demonstrates. The ORDER BY columns need not even be the ones you display, but that’s covered later (Recipe 6.5).