Comments on: Put NULLS Last on MySQL

By: Simon

Simon — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 14:43:10 +0000

sweet dude thanks for that. saved me big time.

By: Michiel

Michiel — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 16:15:52 +0000

Thanks Roman!!!

Can’t believe mysql does not allow for easier control, but anyway, this seems to work.

By: Joe Ellis

Joe Ellis — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 09:55:16 +0000

@Roman, that’s a great tip as most of the solutions seem to only work when sorting ascending. Yours, however, allows you to control both, but still keep the NULLs at the bottom regardless of sort type.

By: Shannon

Shannon — Thu, 28 May 2009 17:07:19 +0000

Thank you!

By: bburcham

bburcham — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 17:19:08 +0000

Oh good one Roman!

By: Roman Kofman

Roman Kofman — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 16:43:38 +0000

This should be more intuitive:

:order => "expected_at IS NULL ASC, expected_at"

Essentially, (expected_at IS NULL) returns a 0 or 1, and the rows are sorted by that value. A secondary sort is then applied by the expected_at column, with the nulls staying where they are.

By: Frank Wöckener

Frank Wöckener — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 18:51:35 +0000

If I want to sort a model “Project” (belongs_to :person) by a foreign attribute:

Project.all(:include => ‘person’, :order => ‘-people.sname DESC’)

it doesn’t throw an error but doesn’t work either. BUT – when I do it like this:

Project.all(:include => ‘person’, :order => ‘-people.sname DESC, people.sname ASC’)

it magically works – nulls at the end. Very mysterious…

By: Michael Economy

Michael Economy — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 07:40:53 +0000

no way!

mysql is so quirky

By: Bill

Bill — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:09:19 +0000

I haven’t tried that Rick. My guess is that it would partition the results but that it would fail to order by expected_at (for those records having a non-NULL expected_at).

By: Rick

Rick — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 04:46:42 +0000

What about this?

ORDER BY (expected_at IS NOT NULL)