Question

I have the following data:

[sequences]
/a1
/a2
/a3
...
/a10

The query SELECT * FROM sequences WHERE nbr <= '/a10' should return the list above, instead it returns:

[results]
/a1
/a10

How do I make it return all the rows in the above list?

Answer 1

It works as it should. To compare the numeric value, you’ll have to convert these to numbers somehow. A good start would be to use substr(yourfieldname, 3) to cut of the/a. Then you can useconvert` to typecast it to int, so your final query will look something like:

select * from sequences where convert(int, substr(nbr, 3)) <= 10

Mind that the exact functions and rules for converting strings to ints may very per dbms. This illustrates the general idea, though.