Order by day_of_week in MySQL

Question

How can I order the mysql result by varchar column that contains day of week name?

Note that MONDAY should goes first, not SUNDAY.

Answer 1

I realise that this is an old thread, but as it comes to the top of google for certain search times I will use it to share my approach.

I wanted the same result as the original question, but in addition I wanted the ordering of the results starting from the current day of the week and then progressing through the rest of the days.

I created a separate table, in which the days were listed over a fortnight, so that no matter which day you started from you could run through a sequence of 7 days.

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `Weekdays` (
  `id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `name` varchar(50) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM  DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=15 ;

INSERT INTO `Weekdays` (`id`, `name`) VALUES
(1, 'Monday'),
(2, 'Tuesday'),
(3, 'Wednesday'),
(4, 'Thursday'),
(5, 'Friday'),
(6, 'Saturday'),
(7, 'Sunday'),
(8, 'Monday'),
(9, 'Tuesday'),
(10, 'Wednesday'),
(11, 'Thursday'),
(12, 'Friday'),
(13, 'Saturday'),
(14, 'Sunday');

I then ran the query with a variable that determined the start point in sequence and used a join to get the order number for the days. For example to start the listing at Wednesday, I do the following:

SELECT @startnum := MIN(id) FROM Weekdays WHERE name='Wednesday';
SELECT * FROM Events INNER JOIN ( SELECT id as weekdaynum, name as dayname FROM Weekdays WHERE id>(@startnum-1) AND id<(@startnum+7) ) AS s2 ON s2.dayname=Events.day ORDER BY weekdaynum;

I hope this helps someone who stumbles onto this post.