Re: Sorting decimal numbers stored in varchar column

[Rick James]

The best way is to have another column that has a sanitized version of the version number. Perhaps:
1.0000.0000
1.0001.0001
etc

It should be possible to do it in an ORDER BY with
* 0+ to convert to numeric
* IFNULL instead of NULLS first and use
* MID and INSTR (see below)
* other functions from
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/string-functions.html
* Note that

Perhaps
ORDER BY
0+MID(a, 0, LOCATE('.', a, 1)-1),
0+MID(a, LOCATE('.', a, 1)+1, LOCATE('.', a, 2)-1),
0+MID(a, LOCATE('.', a, 2)+1, LOCATE('.', a, 3)-1)

(I have not tested that, so it may need some debugging.)