Ordering by the order of values in a SQL IN() clause

Question

I am wondering if there is away (possibly a better way) to order by the order of the values in an IN() clause.

The problem is that I have 2 queries, one that gets al

Answer 1

The IN clause describes a set of values, and sets do not have order.

Your solution with a join and then ordering on the display_order column is the most nearly correct solution; anything else is probably a DBMS-specific hack (or is doing some stuff with the OLAP functions in standard SQL). Certainly, the join is the most nearly portable solution (though generating the data with the display_order values may be problematic). Note that you may need to select the ordering columns; that used to be a requirement in standard SQL, though I believe it was relaxed as a rule a while ago (maybe as long ago as SQL-92).