Sorting a database

The sorting function sorts all games in a database. You can select a number of sort criteria. When two games are equal according to the the first criteria, they are sorted using the second criteria, and so on.

Sort criteria

The available sorting criteria are:

• Date (oldest games first)
• Year (same as date, but using the year only)
• Event name
• Site name
• Country (last 3 letters of Site name)
• Round name
• White name
• Rating (average of White and Black ratings, highest first)
• Black name
• Result (White wins, then draws, then Black wins)
• Length (number of full moves in the game)
• ECO (the Encyclopedia of Chess Openings code)

Sort results

When you sort a ChessDB database that is not read-only, the sort results are saved so the order of games in the database is permanently changed. If you want to the sort results to be temporary, make the database read-only first using the File: Read-only menu command.

When you sort a database that is read-only or is actually a PGN file, the sort results cannot be saved so the sorted order of games will be lost when the file is closed.

Note that sorting a database resets the search filter to contain all games.

Important note about sorting databases:

When a database is sorted, the index file is altered but the game file is not changed. This means sorting a database will leave the game file records in a scrambled order relative to the index file. This can really slow down tree, position and material/pattern searches, so you should reorder the game file by compacting it after sorting the database to maintain good search performance.