I have a simple SQL query in PostgreSQL 8.3 that grabs a bunch of comments. I provide a sorted list of values to the IN construct in the WHERE clause:

SELECT * FROM comments WHERE (comments.id IN (1,3,2,4));

This returns comments in an arbitrary order which in my happens to be ids like 1,2,3,4.

I want the resulting rows sorted like the list in the IN construct: (1,3,2,4).
How to achieve that?


You can do it quite easily with (introduced in PostgreSQL 8.2) VALUES (), ().

Syntax will be like this:

select c.*
from comments c
join (
  values
    (1,1),
    (3,2),
    (2,3),
    (4,4)
) as x (id, ordering) on c.id = x.id
order by x.ordering

In Postgres 9.4 or later, this is simplest and fastest:

SELECT c.*
FROM   comments c
JOIN   unnest('{1,3,2,4}'::int[]) WITH ORDINALITY t(id, ord) USING (id)
ORDER  BY t.ord;
  • WITH ORDINALITY was introduced with in Postgres 9.4.

  • No need for a subquery, we can use the set-returning function like a table directly. (A.k.a. "table-function".)

  • A string literal to hand in the array instead of an ARRAY constructor may be easier to implement with some clients.

  • For convenience (optionally), copy the column name we are joining to (id in the example), so we can join with a short USING clause to only get a single instance of the join column in the result.

  • Works with any input type. If your key column is of type text, provide something like '{foo,bar,baz}'::text[].

Detailed explanation:

  • PostgreSQL unnest() with element number

Just because it is so difficult to find and it has to be spread: in mySQL this can be done much simpler, but I don't know if it works in other SQL.

SELECT * FROM `comments`
WHERE `comments`.`id` IN ('12','5','3','17')
ORDER BY FIELD(`comments`.`id`,'12','5','3','17')

With Postgres 9.4 this can be done a bit shorter:

select c.*
from comments c
join (
  select *
  from unnest(array[43,47,42]) with ordinality
) as x (id, ordering) on c.id = x.id
order by x.ordering;

Or a bit more compact without a derived table:

select c.*
from comments c
  join unnest(array[43,47,42]) with ordinality as x (id, ordering) 
    on c.id = x.id
order by x.ordering

Removing the need to manually assign/maintain a position to each value.

With Postgres 9.6 this can be done using array_position():

with x (id_list) as (
  values (array[42,48,43])
)
select c.*
from comments c, x
where id = any (x.id_list)
order by array_position(x.id_list, c.id);

The CTE is used so that the list of values only needs to be specified once. If that is not important this can also be written as:

select c.*
from comments c
where id in (42,48,43)
order by array_position(array[42,48,43], c.id);