ORDER BY with a UNION of disparate datasets (T-SQL)

Question

I have a query that UNION\'s two somewhat similar datasets, but they both have some columns that are not present in the other (i.e., the columns have NULL values in

Answer 1

You should use UNION ALL instead of UNION to save the cost of duplicate checking.

SELECT *
FROM
(
SELECT t1.ID, t1.Cat, t1.Price, NULL as Name, NULL as Abbrv FROM t1
UNION ALL
SELECT t2.ID, NULL as Cat, NULL as Price, t2.Name, t2.Abbrv FROM t2
) as sub
ORDER BY
  ID,
  CASE WHEN Price is not null THEN 1 ELSE 2 END,
  Price DESC,
  CASE WHEN Abbrv is not null THEN 1 ELSE 2 END,
  Abbrv ASC