[PHOENIX-1749] ORDER BY should support ordinal position as well as expression

• Type: Bug
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 4.4.0
• Assignee: Alicia Ying Shu
• Reporter: Serhiy Bilousov
• Created: 19/Mar/15 00:56
• Updated: 21/Nov/15 02:15
• Resolved: 14/Apr/15 00:18

Description

In postgreSQL (and many others DBs) you can specify not only column name for the ORDER BY but column number (position in SELECT part) as well as column alias.

see:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/static/queries-order.html
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/static/sql-select.html#SQL-GROUPBY

Adding such support would be very helpful and sometimes necessary.

I can provide real queries example if required but basically we want something like this

given query
SELECT a, b, TRUNC(current_date(),'HOUR') AS date_truncated FROM table
we want
ORDER BY 1 ASC, 2 DESC
ORDER BY date_truncated

Having just column number would cover both but having column alias would make queries more readable and human friendly. Plus make it one little stem closer to postgreSQL and SQL standard.

Issue Links

• is cloned by: PHOENIX-1768 GROUP BY should support column position as well as column alias