Arbitrarily ordering records in a table

Question

A common need when using a database is to access records in order. For example, if I have a blog, I want to be able to reorder my blog posts in arbitrary order. These entries often have lots of relationships, so a relational database seems to make sense.

The common solution that I have seen is to add an integer column order:

CREATE TABLE AS your_table (id, title, sort_order)
AS VALUES
  (0, 'Lorem ipsum',   3),
  (1, 'Dolor sit',     2),
  (2, 'Amet, consect', 0),
  (3, 'Elit fusce',    1);

Then, we can sort the rows by order to get them in the proper order.

However, this seems clumsy:

• If I want to move record 0 to the start, I have to reorder every record
• If I want to insert a new record in the middle, I have to reorder every record after it
• If I want to remove a record, I have to reorder every record after it

It's easy to imagine a situations like:

• Two records have the same order
• There are gaps in the order between records

These could happen fairly easily for a number of reasons.

This is the approach that applications like Joomla take:

You could argue that the interface here is bad, and that instead of humans directly editing numbers, they should use arrows or drag-and-drop—and you'd probably be right. But behind the scenes, the same thing is happening.

Some people have proposed using a decimal to store order, so that you can use "2.5" to insert a record in between the records at order 2 and 3. And while that helps a little, it's arguably even messier because you can end up with weird decimals (where do you stop? 2.75? 2.875? 2.8125?)

Is there a better way to store order in a table?