Re: Issue with adding ORDER BY to EXCEPT.

On Tue, Jun 07, 2005 at 12:42:47PM -0500, Scott Marlowe wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-06-07 at 12:16, Jaime Casanova wrote:
> > I suppose this is because the columns in the except are the same that
> > the ones in the main select and the order by get confused.
> >
> > i'm redirecting to hackers to know if this is a known bug or there is
> > something wrong in the select? i don't see anything wrong!!
>
> No, it's because to the order by, the column names are the ones given by
> the part after the period of the first select. If you do a plain select
> UNION select with no order by, you'll see the title for the columns is
> taken from the first select list column names.
>
> So, the order by needs to be "order by encounter_id, encounter_d_id

Or even easier:

order by 1, 2;

Then you don't even need to know the column names...
--
Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog(at)svana(dot)org> http://svana.org/kleptog/
> Patent. n. Genius is 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration. A patent is a
> tool for doing 5% of the work and then sitting around waiting for someone
> else to do the other 95% so you can sue them.