> 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...