Hopefully this is not a dup post. I had to kill my last one to do
some typos.


I'm still playing with this one and looking for some solution in the
Oracle docs, but, can I have a UNION query and tell it which rows to
return and the order to return them in? We're on 10g R2.


SELECT symbol, comp_name, top FROM (
SELECT symbol, comp_name, 1 top FROM master_table
WHERE REGEXP_LIKE (symbol, '^JK| JK')
UNION
SELECT symbol, comp_name, 2 top FROM master_table
WHERE REGEXP_LIKE (comp_name, '^JK| JK'))
WHERE rownum <= 25
ORDER BY top, ticker;


Basically I want to select as many as I can from the first query, and
have them ordered. If it does not meet the number of records to be
returned, 25 in this example, I want to include records from the
second query, and have them ordered. If the first does meet the
number criteria, then the second query is not needed. Additionally,
I
want the n records to be ordered regardless on whether it uses results
from either or both queries.

Problem with this query is that if the symbol and company name both
meet the criteria, I get duplicates. I use the 1 and 2 to make sure
the symbols get ordered first.

I'll need to put this into one select statement.....just the
restrictions of our setup and application. We'll be opening this up
as a cursor: OPEN data FOR v_query;

I'm still searching examples and documentation. If I find the answer,
I'll let everyone know.