Order by with groups

[meupton]

I have a table of staff positions that I want to put in a pulldown list and have it grouped by departments in another table showing the departments also. i.e.

Executives
President
Vice President
Staff
Staff Position 1
Staff Position 2

The department table has the names associated with a staff position id.

Is this possible?

[leatherback]

Yes.
I do not know how you have organized the info. If you have a colum linking staff and departments, you can use a left join between staff and department, order by department, staff_name will give you an output of all staff, sorted by department and staff name.
In your PhP code you keep track of which department you are processing. When a new department passes (eg: if $row['department_id'] <> $lastdepartment) you set the $lastdepartment to the $row['department_id'] and you output the department label.

J