ORDER BY Archives - IT Jungle

Guru: SQL Facts Of UNION And ORDER BY, Take Two

April 17, 2017 Ted Holt

Hey, Ted:

In last week’s tip, you mentioned that expressions are not allowed in the ORDER BY clause of a union. You can use the union as a subquery to allow the use of an expression for the ordering. An extra layer, but it gives you the result you are looking for.

–S. Sims

Sims is correct. I was so focused on the fact that the ORDER BY of a union does not allow expressions that I completely forgot about a workaround. His (her?) technique is probably the most common way to deal with this limitation. I’ve seen numerous examples …
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Guru: SQL Facts Of UNION And ORDER BY

April 10, 2017 Ted Holt

UNION and ORDER BY are powerful SQL features, but put the two together and you may get some strange and frustrating error messages. Fortunately for us DB2 for i professionals, there are easy ways to make the two collaborate and cooperate. Today is a great day to be sure we understand them.

We need some data for examples. For some of the queries, I use a customer master table (file) and a vendor master table. These are a company’s trading partners, so the two have many attributes in common, especially names and addresses. I also use two sales history tables, …
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