Re: ORDER BY handling mixed integer and varchar values

On Mon, 2005-05-16 at 11:47 -0700, David B wrote:

(sorting text columns numerically)

> And of course I get stuff ordered as I want it.
> BUT… with many product categories being numeric based they come out in
> wrong order '10 comes before 2" etc.
>
> So I tried
> Select product_desc, product_price, product_cat
> Order by cast(product_cat as integer), product_price
>
> And that worked for the numberic based categories.
>
> I don't know of a query will be across alpha or numeric categories.
> Is there any elegent query you folks can think of that combines the
> two so I can one query that has alpha sorting on alpha categories and
> numeric sorting on numeric values that are in the same column??

select product_desc, product_price, product_cat
order by cast(product_cat as integer), product_cat, product_price

gnari