Re: sorting query results

Andrew McMillan wrote:
> On Sat, 2009-04-18 at 16:03 +0300, Piotr Mitoraj wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>> failing to find the straight-forward answer on the web I hope to find
>> some advice in here.
>> I want to display the table fetched from the postgres database. The
>> headers of the columns are links used to sort the data. Like the
>> functionality you have on ebay when you sort according to price or time
>> left. I recognized two ways of doing that:
>>
>> 1. Issue a new query to the database each time the specific sorting was
>> requested. In other words, let the database do the sorting and fetch the
>> results.
>>
>> 2. Save the table into php array and and use php built-in functions to
>> sort and refresh the table.
>>
>> Which of those methods would be most desired in terms of performance and
>> according to "the best practices"?
>> What would be possible drawbacks/advantages of those methods.
>>
>
> Personally I've found it easiest to implement the sorting in database.
> The reason this is easier is that the programming involved is just a
> small change to the 'ORDER BY' clause in the SQL, whereas the sorting in
> PHP would often change the whole way the query results are processed.
>
> Another approach I have seen used, which you don't mention, is to do the
> sorting in javascript, client side.  This has the advantage that the
> database is only queried the first time and all re-sorting is done
> client-side.  In this case sorting on things like time/date data can be
> more problematic, and of course you're depending client-side behaviour
> also.
>
> Cheers,
>                     Andrew.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> andrew (AT) morphoss (DOT) com                            +64(272)DEBIAN
>           Powering the .NZ namespace with Open Source Software
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
Thanks for advice Lukass and Andrew. Tablesorter really made my day!
Previously I was not even considering javascript, but for my purpose
seems to be the best.
Quick links for reference just in case anyone else got interested:
http://tablesorter.com/docs/
http://docs.jquery.com/Main_Page

Piotr