Sort upcoming birthdays based on current date

Question

I have the following table of people and their birthdays:

name        birthday
----------------------
yannis      1979-06-29
natalia     1980-08-19
kostas            


        

Answer 1

SELECT name
     , birthday
FROM TableX
ORDER BY DAYOFYEAR(birthday) < DAYOFYEAR(CURDATE())
       , DAYOFYEAR(birthday)

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No, the above may produce error results, due to years with 366 days. This is correct:

SELECT name
     , birthday
FROM
  ( SELECT name
         , birthday
         , MONTH(birthday) AS m
         , DAY(birthday) As d
    FROM TableX
  ) AS tmp
ORDER BY (m,d) < ( MONTH(CURDATE()), DAY(CURDATE()) )
       , m
       , d

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If your table grows to more than a few thousands records, it will be real slow. If you want a fast query, add fields with the month and day and have an index on (bmonth,bday) or add them as one field, either Char (08-17 or 0817 for 17-Aug) or Int (817 for 17-Aug) and an index on that field.