How do I return rows with a specific value first?

Question

I want my query to return the rows of the table where a column contains a specific value first, and then return the rest of the rows alphabetized.

If I have a table something like this example:

 - Table   :   Users

 - id - name -  city

 - 1    George  Seattle

 - 2    Sam     Miami

 - 3    John    New York

 - 4    Amy     New York

 - 5    Eric    Chicago

 - 6    Nick    New York

And using that table I want my query to return the rows which contain New York first, and then the rest of the rows alphabetized by the city. Is this possible to do using only one query?

Answer 1

On SQL Server, DB2, Oracle and many other database systems, you can use the below code:

ORDER BY CASE WHEN city = 'New York' THEN 1 ELSE 2 END, city