Re-Setting the ID number?

[nazca]

I have entered restaurants into my database by city to speed the process up, but when I find another restaurant later and put it with the same city
it comes later and not in-order by name. Since i cannot order by name due to complexities, how can I re-assign the id numbers in my database so that
the restaurants are displayed alphabetically correctly within each city.  I can do a script each time for each city does not bother me.  I want to keep my data of course.  Hope you can help and thanks.

[cmgmyr]

one thing that you can do is change the id's to show alfa order. (change the first one that is supposed to be the first alphabetically to 1, the second to 2)

It might take a while, I would try re-thinking your database.

-Chris

[AndyB]

If the id is an autonumber then DON"T EVEN THINK OF CHANGING IT.  Record ids are something that should be thought of as an intrinsic part of the inner workings of MySQL and nothing to do with how you display the data.  The whole point of a relational database is that you can have table that refer to data in other tables and id is that reference.

Why can't you simply display them in alphabetical order (ORDER by restaurant_name for example)?

[fenway]

AndyB is entirely correct -- don't even dream of touching the auto-increment value.  There must be some way to determine the correct order, so you can always do it at run time.

[akitchin]

it sounds to me like all you need is a multiple-field ordering clause:

[code]ORDER BY restaurant_city ASC, restaurant_name ASC[/code]

this will sort by city first, then among each city, by restaurant name.

(agreed about the importance of leaving a key be)