Of course it's a complete disorganized mess..That'a the world I live in.Best thing is, I'm walking away with some new strategies.You guys rock -------- Original message --------From: Sándor Daku <daku.san...@gmail.com> Date: 8/14/21 10:19 AM (GMT-08:00) To: Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> Cc: Adrian Klaver <adrian.kla...@aklaver.com>, Bret Stern <bret_st...@machinemanagement.com>, pgsql-general@lists.postgresql.org Subject: Re: Sort question - Fractions, Metric etc On Sat, 14 Aug 2021 at 19:03, Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:Adrian Klaver <adrian.kla...@aklaver.com> writes: > On 8/14/21 9:37 AM, Bret Stern wrote: >> I haven't explored doing this with numeric types, but some columns >> needed alpha chars eg 13mm.
> Two columns: > data_val(numeric) data_unit(varchar) > 13 mm It sounds like your data is a completely disorganized mess :-(. You might be able to bring some semblance of coherence to it with an extension like postgresql-unit [1], but it will take a lot of effort to get the data into a representation that can sort reasonably. There's no "easy button" here. regards, tom lane [1] https://github.com/df7cb/postgresql-unitI'm not sure, but maybe a kind of cast function that cast everything into a reasonable common unit(Khm... millimeters) and sort on that? It seems relatively simple to pick up the value and unit from a string with a regexp. Admittedly the data would still be a mess. Regards,Sándor
