To: "David B" <davidb999@gmail.com>, pgsql-sql@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: ORDER BY handling mixed integer and varchar values
References: <c76ea21c050516114742818cfa@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <op.sqvua2ogth1vuj@localhost>
Date: Mon, 16 May 2005 21:12:28 +0200
From: PFC <lists@boutiquenumerique.com>
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> 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??

solution 1 (fast)

make a separate column which contains the integer value (updated via a  
trigger) or NULL if it's a textual value, then sort on it

solution 2

order by the string padded to a fixed length by adding spaces to the left :
(here an underscore is a space):

____1
___10
_ABCD

I think there's a LPAD function (look in the docs) to do that... you can  
use only the first N (like 10) chars of the string...