Is there a fast way to order a Select result set to be the same as the In clause used in the Where clause?

For example:
SELECT * FROM tCompanies
WHERE idCompany IN (987, 321, 654)
ORDER BY (987, 321, 654)

It seems this would be a somewhat common need.

I can envision a stored procedure using a temp table with an extra intSortBy column, an array with the In clause numbers and sort number, and a loop to populate the intSortBy column. This would be fine for small result sets, but probably too time-consuming for large sets.

thanks in advance,

Conrad

It seems you are confused about what ORDER BY is for. You order by a column or set of columns. I think your intent is to get the results with a custom order of 987, 321, 654. In order to do this, you have to do a bit of trickery. Fortunately when SQL builds its result set, it processes the order by after building the columns, so you can create some custom column results then order by that. In this case, we can use to the SQL CASE statement to create your "intSortBy" column. This should work:

SELECT *, CASE idCompany WHEN 987 THEN 1 WHEN 321 THEN 2 WHEN 654 THEN 3 END AS Order
FROM tCompanies
WHERE idCompany IN (987, 321, 654)
ORDER BY Order

Now, 987 will be 1st, 321 2nd, and 654 3rd. Add columns to the ORDER BY clause as needed, and add cases to the CASE as needed.

Conrad,

But, are those values within IN(...) fixed? If fixed, then this is the a good solution to achieve that. If thats going to be dynamic(say using a subquery there to generate list of Ids), then this would not apply, as one wouldn't be sure how many are to come and what the values are, to decide the number of cases and expressions within it.

Hope that helps.
Cheers!

_________________________
- Vijay G
Strive for Perfection