Re: Sorting by an arbitrary criterion

On Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 5:26 PM, Craig James<craig_james@emolecules.com> wrote:
> Suppose I have a large table with a small-cardinality CATEGORY column (say,
> categories 1..5).  I need to sort by an arbitrary (i.e. user-specified)
> mapping of CATEGORY, something like this:
>
>  1 => 'z'
>  2 => 'a'
>  3 => 'b'
>  4 => 'w'
>  5 => 'h'
>
> So when I get done, the sort order should be 2,3,5,4,1.
>
> I could create a temporary table with the category-to-key mapping, but is
> there any way to do this in a single SQL statement?
>

you can create translation table, join it, and sort by its key.


--
GJ