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-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
