Support "natural sorting" / DIGITSASNUMBERS as a Collation option
Quite often** people want to sort a string containing either only numbers, or a mix of letters and numbers in a pattern, such that the numeric portion of that string is sorted as an actual number. For example, "Class40g" would come before "Class300c", not after. This behavior has already been integrated into File Explorer, starting in Windows 7.
Currently when people need to do this type of sorting, they need to create silly and inefficient methods of parsing the string into separate alpha and numeric chunks.
** often = numerous questions regarding how to accomplish this type of sorting on MSDN Forums, StackOverflow, DBA.StackExchange, etc.
AdminMicrosoft SQL Server
(Product Manager, Microsoft Azure)
shared this idea
Upvotes: 11
<=-=Jul 15 2016 6:51AM=-=>I offer as evidence for the desire for this to happen, the 1k+ views of my stackoverflow question from 2011. A little under a person a day.
<=-=Jul 15 2016 8:40AM=-=>Adding to the link that Justin posted to his Stack Overflow question:
http://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/117379/sort-a-varchar-type-column
http://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/126744/order-by-and-comparison-of-mixed-strings-of-letters-and-numbers
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/34509/natural-human-alpha-numeric-sort-in-microsoft-sql-2005
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3158917/natural-sort-for-sql-server
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22461619/complex-sort-of-field-string-number-string
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24989365/sorting-a-string-numerically-in-sql-server
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26552435/sorting-mixed-numbers-and-letters
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26932310/sql-server-string-convert-numeric-and-sorting-issue
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28278467/sort-dropdown-list-in-alpha-numeric-order
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28372359/natural-sort-for-sql-server
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/29676432/alphanumeric-sort
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/30502118/sort-float-numbers-as-a-natural-numbers-in-sql-server
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/35001818/alphanumeric-and-numeric-sorting-in-sql-server
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/37728476/sql-sorting-numeric-and-string
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/51602/How-to-Sort-Alphanumeric-Data-in-SQL
<=-=Mar 3 2017 1:02PM=-=>We understand the scenario and if it gets more votes we will consider it for the next releases. It is assigned to our collation & string processing team.
1 comment
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Solomon Rutzky
commented
I originally submitted this suggestion via: