Ranking search results

Question

I have a tutoring website with a search feature. I want tutors to appear on the list according to several weighted criteria, including whether or not they are subscription holders, if they have submitted a profile photo, if they have included a lot of information about themselves, etc...

Basically, I have a lot of criteria by which I would like to weigh their rank.

Instead of writing a complicated SQL query with multiple ORDER BYs (if this is even possible), I was thinking of creating a table (maybe a temporary one), that assigns numerical values based on several criteria to come up with a final search rank.

I'm not entirely sure about how to go about this, or if this is a good idea, so I would like to know what the community thinks about a) this method, and b) possible ways of implementing this in SQL.

Answer 1

I would add a field to one of the existing tables that more or less was a representation of their "weight" for sorting purposes. I would then populate this column with a database procedure that ran every so often (you could make a queue that only runs on records that have been updated, or just run it on all records if you want). That way, I can just pull back the data and order by one column instead of multiple ones.

Also, you could use a View. It really depends on if you want to number crunching to be done by the procedure or by the database every time you pull data (for a search feature and for speed's sake, I'd suggest the database procedure).