In my post yesterday, I shared a little known trick for sorting NULLs last when using ORDER BY ASC.

To summarize briefly, NULLs are treated as less than 0 when used in ORDER BY, However, sometimes you do not want that behavior, and you need the NULLs listed last, even though you want your numbers in ascending order.

So a query like the following returns the NULLs first (expected behavior):

SELECT * FROM t1 ORDER BY col1 ASC, col2 ASC;
+--------+------+
| col1   | col2 |
+--------+------+
| apple  | NULL |
| apple  |    5 |
| apple  |   10 |
| banana | NULL |
| banana |    5 |
| banana |   10 |
+--------+------+

The trick I mentioned in my post is to rewrite the query like:

SELECT * FROM t1 ORDER BY col1 ASC, -col2 DESC;

The difference is that we added a minus sign (-) in front of the column …

I was working on a seemingly basic query the other day where the user needed to have an INT column listed in ascending order (i.e., 1, 2, 3, …).

However, the tricky part came in because the column allowed NULLs and the user needed the NULLs to be listed last, not first, which is the default behavior in both MariaDB and MySQL.

We first devised a somewhat convoluted solution where we used ISNULL() first in the ORDER BY, and then the column, but that wasn’t ideal since it added an additional check for each row in the ORDER BY, which we wanted to avoid in a query returning ~5M rows.

To illustrate, a normal query just sorting in ASC order returned:

MariaDB> SELECT * FROM t1 ORDER BY col1 ASC, col3 ASC;
+--------+--------+------+
| col1   | col2   | col3 |
+--------+--------+------+
| apple  | yellow | NULL |
| apple  | red    |    5 |
| apple  | green  |   10 |
| banana | brown  | NULL |
| banana | green  |    5 |
| …