Natural Sort in MySQL

Question

Is there an elegant way to have performant, natural sorting in a MySQL database?

For example if I have this data set:

• Final Fantasy
• Final Fant

Answer 1

MySQL doesn't allow this sort of "natural sorting", so it looks like the best way to get what you're after is to split your data set up as you've described above (separate id field, etc), or failing that, perform a sort based on a non-title element, indexed element in your db (date, inserted id in the db, etc).

Having the db do the sorting for you is almost always going to be quicker than reading large data sets into your programming language of choice and sorting it there, so if you've any control at all over the db schema here, then look at adding easily-sorted fields as described above, it'll save you a lot of hassle and maintenance in the long run.

Requests to add a "natural sort" come up from time to time on the MySQL bugs and discussion forums, and many solutions revolve around stripping out specific parts of your data and casting them for the ORDER BY part of the query, e.g.

SELECT * FROM table ORDER BY CAST(mid(name, 6, LENGTH(c) -5) AS unsigned) 

This sort of solution could just about be made to work on your Final Fantasy example above, but isn't particularly flexible and unlikely to extend cleanly to a dataset including, say, "Warhammer 40,000" and "James Bond 007" I'm afraid.