Question

I have a table like:

id  name
--------
1   clark_009
2   clark_012
3   johny_002
4   johny_010

I need to get results in this order:

johny_002
clark_009
johny_010
clark_012

Do not ask me what I already tried, I have no idea how to do this.

Answer 1

This will do it, very simply selecting the right-most 3 characters and ordering by that value ascending.

SELECT *
FROM table_name
ORDER BY RIGHT(name, 3) ASC;

It should be added that as your data grows, this will become an inefficient solution. Eventually, you’ll probably want to store the numeric appendix in a separate, indexed integer column, so that sorting will be optimally efficient.