On Sat, 14 Aug 2021 at 19:03, Tom Lane <tgl@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Adrian Klaver <adrian.klaver@xxxxxxxxxxx> 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
