Order By Case String Not Working I am trying to get my SQL search to work. What I am looking for is a search result that pulls information based on either a company's name or their stock trading ticker. If one would to type in M, I would expect:

MAT  - Mattel
MFST - Microsoft
MA   - MasterCard
MDLZ - Mondelez
MON  - Monsanto


It queries the "ticker" just fine, but how would I get it to allow both? If I search MO instead of "M", I would expect to see this:

MON  - Monsanto
MDLZ - Mondelez


I want it to give bias towards the "ticker", but also query the name if it is like the search term. Here is my code:

SELECT `stock_id`, `stock_ticker`, `stock_simpleName` 
FROM `stocks` 
WHERE `stock_ticker` = 'M' 
GROUP BY `stock_ticker`, `stock_simpleName` 
ORDER BY CASE  
    WHEN `stock_ticker` LIKE 'M%' THEN 1 
    WHEN `stock_simpleName` LIKE 'M%' THEN 2 
    ELSE 3 
END 
LIMIT 5


I wrote a different query that easily pulled the "ticker" alone, but trying to query them both with bias towards one of the columns like stated above seems to be a bit difficult. My AJAX returns an error which obviously means it's returning a PHP error rather than the data that should be requested.

Is there a tweak for this to get it to work?
So I tweaked the code a bit by testing it in phpMyAdmin, and this is what worked:

SELECT `stock_id`, `stock_ticker`, `stock_simpleName` 
FROM `stocks` 
GROUP BY `stock_ticker`, `stock_simpleName` 
ORDER BY CASE 
    WHEN `stock_ticker` LIKE 'MO%' THEN 1 
    WHEN `stock_simpleName` LIKE 'MO%' THEN 2 
    ELSE 3 
END 
LIMIT 5


I just removed the WHERE Statement entirely. It works exactly like I needed it to. I thought WHERE was always required for any statement that succeeds the FROM table.column part of the query. `