MySQL order by problems

Question

I have the following codes..

echo \"
<         


        

Answer 1

The database server is allowed to rewrite your query to optimize its execution. This might affect the order of the individual parts, in particular the order in which the various assignments are executed. I assume that some such reodering causes the result of the query to become undefined, in such a way that it works on sqlfiddle but not on your actual production system.

I can't put my finger on the exact location where things go wrong, but I believe that the core of the problem is the fact that SQL is intended to work on relations, but you try to abuse it for sequential programming. I suggest you retrieve the data from the database using portable SQL without any variable hackery, and then use PHP to perform any post-processing you might need. PHP is much better suited to express the ideas you're formulating, and no optimization or reordering of statements will get in your way there. And as your query currently only results in a single value, fetching multiple rows and combining them into a single value in the PHP code shouldn't increase complexety too much.

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Edit:

While discussing another answer using a similar technique (by Omesh as well, just as the answer your code is based upon), I found this in the MySQL manual:

As a general rule, you should never assign a value to a user variable and read the value within the same statement. You might get the results you expect, but this is not guaranteed. The order of evaluation for expressions involving user variables is undefined and may change based on the elements contained within a given statement; in addition, this order is not guaranteed to be the same between releases of the MySQL Server.

So there are no guarantees about the order these variable assignments are evaluated, therefore no guarantees that the query does what you expect. It might work, but it might fail suddenly and unexpectedly. Therefore I strongly suggest you avoid this approach unless you have some relaibale mechanism to check the validity of the results, or really don't care about whether they are valid.