MySQL reorder row id by date - mysql

Question

SELECT time
FROM posts
ORDER BY time ASC;
This will order my posts for me in a list. I would like to reorder the table itself making sure that there are no missing table ids. Thus, if I delete column 2, I can reorder so that row 3 will become row 2.
How can I do this? Reorder a table by its date column so there is always an increment of 1, no non-existing rows.

Answer 1

Disclaimer: I don't really know why you would need to do it, but if you do, here is just one of many ways, fairly independent of the engine or the server version.
Setup:
CREATE TABLE t (
`id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`time` time DEFAULT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB;
INSERT INTO t (`time`) VALUES ('13:00:00'),('08:00:00'),('02:00:00');
DELETE FROM t WHERE id = 2;
Initial condition:
SELECT * FROM t ORDER BY `time`;
+----+----------+
| id | time |
+----+----------+
| 3 | 02:00:00 |
| 1 | 13:00:00 |
+----+----------+
2 rows in set (0.00 sec)
Action:
CREATE TRIGGER tr AFTER UPDATE ON t FOR EACH ROW SET #id:=#id+1;
ALTER TABLE t ADD COLUMN new_id INT NOT NULL AFTER id;
SET #id=1;
UPDATE t SET new_id=#id ORDER BY time;
DROP TRIGGER tr;
Result:
SELECT * FROM t ORDER BY `time`;
+----+--------+----------+
| id | new_id | time |
+----+--------+----------+
| 3 | 1 | 02:00:00 |
| 1 | 2 | 13:00:00 |
+----+--------+----------+
2 rows in set (0.00 sec)
Cleanup:
Further you can do whatever is more suitable for your case (whatever is faster and less blocking, depending on other conditions). You can update the existing id column and then drop the extra one:
UPDATE t SET id=new_id;
ALTER TABLE t DROP new_id;
SELECT * FROM t ORDER BY `time`;
+----+----------+
| id | time |
+----+----------+
| 1 | 02:00:00 |
| 2 | 13:00:00 |
+----+----------+
2 rows in set (0.00 sec)
Or you can drop the existing id column and promote new_id to the primary key.
Comments:
A natural variation of the same approach would be to wrap it into a stored procedure. It's basically the same, but requires a bit more text. The benefit of it is that you could keep the procedure for the next time you need it.
Assuming you have a unique index on id, a temporary column new_id is needed in a general case, because if you start updating id directly, you can get a unique key violation. It shouldn't happen if your id is already ordered properly, and you are only removing gaps.