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.sandor@gmail.com>
Date: 8/14/21 10:19 AM (GMT-08:00)
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: Adrian Klaver <adrian.klaver@aklaver.com>, Bret Stern <bret_stern@machinemanagement.com>, pgsql-general@lists.postgresql.org
Subject: Re: Sort question - Fractions, Metric etc
Adrian Klaver <adrian.klaver@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-unit
I'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