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.
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.