Is it possible to supersede the ORDER BY clause in mysql?

Question

By that I mean... if I have a column named "special" and rows that are marked 1 in that column would appear at the top of the results, even if the ORDER BY clause would list them elsewhere. For example, I display items by date, in descending order. Items that are marked special=1 would appear at the top of the results, regardless of their timestamp.

How can I achieve this?

Answer 1

ORDER BY 'special' first (descending) and then by your other criteria.

Answer 2

You can put multiple columns in an ORDER BY clause

SELECT * from your_table ORDER BY special DESC, date_col DESC