Numbers are the lifeblood of any business. With data mining at an all-time high, understanding how to interface with mountains of raw data is essential — which is where SQL comes in.

I need to query against a column which contains build numbers stored as an NVARCHAR.Sorting works fine until you get into double-digit versions.This works ...

Another way of doing the same thing for SQL is to make a column for sorting and pad all numbers with zeros. So, 12R57B will become 0000012R0000057B.

A quick search of jobs containing "SQL" resulted in 400,000+ results. Meanwhile, a search for "Bigtable" resulted in 1,561 results, less than 1% of the SQL number.