I am looking for any suggestions to this problem. I have a table with a
varchar field. This field can hold textual or numeric data, but it is
stored in a varchar field so the database sees it all as text.
I need to be able to search and sort this field as if it were numeric.
For example, here is some sample data
2.5
4
2
6
7
6.2
3.4
6
I need to be able query the table to get the rows within a certain range,
for example, between 4 and 7:
select * from table where field1>=4 and field1<=7
This doesn't work because the column is not a numeric data type. Is there
anyway to dynamically cast the data to a numeric format so I can use
MySQL's numeric sorting?
I can't change the field's data type because it also needs to be able to
hold textual data. Thank you for your help.
--
Steve Musumeche
CIO, Internet Retail Connection
