specifying ORDER BY with a fixed order

[marist89]

AFAIK, no. The only way you could do this is to have a seperate table that has a column for the 'Catn' and then an order specifier. ex.

TableB:
colA varchar2(10),
colOrder number(5)

Then, you could:
select a.colA, sum(a.colB) from tableA a, TableB b
where a.colA in ('Cat1', 'Cat2', 'Cat5', 'Cat4', 'Cat3')
and a.colA = b.colA
group by colA
order by b.colOrder