My sql query will not seem to bring back dates in the correct order. It

will brin them back in a semi-order. Here is the query and what it
brings back. Any thoughts on how to get the dates to come back in
order, formatted the way I want? Thanks.
QUERY:

select num, DATE_FORMAT(startDate,'%b %e, %Y') as startDate,
DATE_FORMAT(endDate, '%b %e, %Y') as endDate, reason from
exceptionDates order by startDate DESC, endDate DESC;

RESULTS:

+-----+--------------+--------------+----------------------+

On 25 Sep 2006 09:11:25 -0700, aquanutz (AT) gmail (DOT) com wrote:


Are you sure you want to do this?

It looks like the query is doing exactly what you told it to do.

Maybe try:

select num, DATE_FORMAT(startDate,'%b %e, %Y') as xxxStartDate,
DATE_FORMAT(endDate, '%b %e, %Y') as xxxEndDate, reason from
exceptionDates order by startDate DESC, endDate DESC;

I haven't tested it ... let us know if it works.

--

Dennis K.

aquanutz (AT) gmail (DOT) com wrote:


That's exactly what you asked for. DATE_FORMAT() delivers a string,
strings are sorted lexicographically. If you want chronological order,
just sort by the original column (it's perfectly legal to ORDER BY
a column that's not in your result). However you must alias the
converted date column to a different name then.

BTW, I do not recommend to alias computed result columns identical
to existing columns. This will easily cause confusion.


XL
--
Axel Schwenke, Senior Software Developer, MySQL AB

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