Re: Reverse comma seperated field

[Peter Brawley]

An unfortunate illustration of why atomicity (one value per cell) is a fundamental RDBMS requirement.

Rather than script a repetition of that design error, consider projecting the column to the indexed child table where it belongs, ie create a table like items( parentid, idx, item ) where oarentid ties a group of items to the parent table PK, and use substring_index() to break out each comma-separated value to an ordinal idx and an item value; after that, you can easily manipulate the idx values to produce any desired ordering.