How to group some results at the top...

Note: I know the spacing on this post is kinda crazy. Don't have time to fight with blogger's editor right now, so just deal, okay?

Let's say you want to get a list of things back from a query, grouping a particular group of items at the top of your query, and the rest below.

For example, let's say you're getting back a contact list sorted alphabetically by organization, and THEN by contact's last name. Let's say you want all of those that belong to "RandCorp" to show at the top because you're interested in those first. Normally, you could sort by "org" and then by "lastname". Unfortunately, RandCorp comes after AAA Coating in the alpha sort. But what you really want is the randCorp items to be listed first (cause those are the ones you're most interested in, but you also want to see the others).

Here's one way to do it.

SELECT LastName, Org,
CASE WHEN Org = 'RandCorp' THEN 1 ELSE 0 AS keySort
FROM Clients
ORDER BY keySort DESC, Org, LastName

If your data looked like this:

LastName	Org
Myers	Zenith Tech
Radner	AAA Coating
Ferrel	RandCorp
Farley	Zenith Tech
Murphy	AAA Coating

This query would return:

LastName	Org
Ferrel	RandCorp
Murphy	AAA Coating
Radner	AAA Coating
Farley	Zenith Tech
Myers	Zenith Tech