Bill Burcham’s memeRocket

NULLs are a wonderful but strange feature of SQL. They are the source of some deep coolness but also some lost hair. One place where NULLs can bite you is when you are sorting. The way you sort in SQL is by appending the ORDER BY clause to the end of a SELECT statement. The problem is that the SQL standards say that for the purpose of sorting, NULL = NULL but they don’t specify how NULL values should be ordered relative to non-NULL ones. Doh!

In this post I describe the solution to this problem in the context of MySQL and Ruby on Rails.
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The Unix tools philosophy is so well known and oft-repeated that it has become mantra to many. As with so many habitual, memorized responses, like blessing someone after a sneeze, we rarely think deeply about the words said, and what they really mean. We don’t notice that while we praise this approach, we almost never use it for anything serious.

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