Is there a way in SQL (MySQL) to do a “round robin” ORDER BY on a particular field?

Question

Is there a way in SQL (MySQL) to do a \"round robin\" ORDER BY on a particular field?

As an example, I would like to take a table such as this one:

Answer 1

What you can do is create a temporary column in which you create sets to give you something like this:

+-------+------+-----+
| group | name | tmp |
+-------+------+-----+
|     1 | A    |   1 |
|     1 | B    |   2 |
|     1 | C    |   3 |
|     2 | D    |   1 |
|     2 | E    |   2 |
|     2 | F    |   3 |
|     3 | G    |   1 |
|     3 | H    |   2 |
|     3 | I    |   3 |
+-------+------+-----+

To learn how to create the sets, have a look at this question/answer.

Then its a simple

ORDER BY tmp, group, name