SQL order by column name

Question

I have some data from excel exported to a MySql server. I want to do a query with results sorted with column names as in excel.

I had this query statement:

SELECT CellValue, Col, Row FROM cell WHERE Col != "A" ORDER BY Col ASC;

But the result is order in a way, not what I expected.

AA, AB, AC, B, BA, C, CA, CB, ...  

What I want is

B, C, AA, AB, ...

What should I change/add to the query statement to have my wanted results?

Answer 1

Use a two-tier sort, first by the length of col, followed by the value of col:

SELECT CellValue, Col, `Row`
FROM cell
WHERE Col != 'A'
ORDER BY LENGTH(Col), Col;

Note that ROW became a reserved MySQL keyword as of MySQL 8+. You should avoid using this as a name for your columns (or tables).