I promise to get back to writing articles on a more regular basis soon, but in the meantime, here's a comment from Nathan A. on using DISTINCT and ORDER BY:
Jeff,
This is actually a problem I have been puzzling over for quite a while now. I actually need to do that sort. I wonder if I may have to create another column that has the list of ordering values in it in increasing order so for my example above assuming a letter table and a number table that contains the numbers for letters, the number table would not change but I...