SQL Server: issue with UNION ALL and two Selects

Question

I am pretty new to SQL and might be doing something wrong here so I hope someone can help me with this.

I have a longer stored procedure that ends with the below. The idea here is to combine two queries into one so that I don't need a separate stored procedure but still have the results separated as one selects by a country (selCountry) and the other selects by a date (selDate).

When I try to save it this way I get the error: "Incorrect syntax near the keyword 'UNION'. When I run them in separate procedures then everything works fine.

-- create final output
SELECT      CONVERT(DATETIME, dDay) AS dDay,
            CONVERT(VARCHAR(11), dDay, 106) AS dLong,
            CONVERT(VARCHAR(10), dDay, 126) AS dShort,
            countries,
            regions,
            mode,
            dName,
            dDesc
FROM        @tempFix
WHERE       countries LIKE '%'+@selCountry+'%'
OR          regions LIKE '%'+@selCountry+'%'
ORDER BY    dDay
UNION ALL
SELECT      CONVERT(DATETIME, dDay) AS dDay,
            CONVERT(VARCHAR(11), dDay, 106) AS dLong,
            CONVERT(VARCHAR(10), dDay, 126) AS dShort,
            countries,
            regions,
            mode,
            dName,
            dDesc
FROM        @tempFix
WHERE       DAY(dDay) = DAY(@selDate)
AND         MONTH(dDay) = MONTH(@selDate)
FOR XML PATH('dDays'), ELEMENTS, TYPE, ROOT('root')

Many thanks in advance for any help with this, Mike.

Answer 1

You can include the ORDER BY clause only at the end of all set operations in your query

Answer 2

you can't include ORDER BY until after the last query in the UNION.

Answer 3

Please remove the ORDER BY and add it to the very end. You cannot place ORDER BY before UNION / UNION ALL.

Here's more information about this syntax.