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Moskie · 04-19-2004, 05:48 AM

As part of an assignment, I've been asked to sort and display some information using different sort methods. One of the sort methods I'm assigned is to sort the information directly in the SQL statement. That normally would be extremely simply, but it seems particularly complicated in this situation.

I have a table called Employee, which has a column called "Name". Names in this column are in the form "<FirstName><space><LastName>". Such as "Joe Smith". The problem is that I am supposed to sort by Employee's last name, which means I can't just do "ORDER BY Name". Is there some kinky thing I can put in the ORDER BY clause to get this sorted properly?

It also crossed my mind that I could write a stored procedure that would produce a record's last name for me, but I'm not sure how to do that... my string-manipulation-within-SQL skills are not that great, and I'm not even sure if it can be done.

Any thoughts on how to do this?

edit: I should add that I'm doing this with an MBD file in a Visual Studio .Net 2003 VB application.

04-19-2004, 05:48 AM	#1 (permalink)
Moskie Pure Chewing Satisfaction Location: can i use bbcode [i]here[/i]?	[SQL] ORDER BY question As part of an assignment, I've been asked to sort and display some information using different sort methods. One of the sort methods I'm assigned is to sort the information directly in the SQL statement. That normally would be extremely simply, but it seems particularly complicated in this situation. I have a table called Employee, which has a column called "Name". Names in this column are in the form "<FirstName><space><LastName>". Such as "Joe Smith". The problem is that I am supposed to sort by Employee's last name, which means I can't just do "ORDER BY Name". Is there some kinky thing I can put in the ORDER BY clause to get this sorted properly? It also crossed my mind that I could write a stored procedure that would produce a record's last name for me, but I'm not sure how to do that... my string-manipulation-within-SQL skills are not that great, and I'm not even sure if it can be done. Any thoughts on how to do this? edit: I should add that I'm doing this with an MBD file in a Visual Studio .Net 2003 VB application. __________________ Greetings and salutations. Last edited by Moskie; 04-19-2004 at 05:58 AM..