First, nice article, great coverage of the topic. Couple things worth mentioning:
1 -
One reason why you might use the ordinal position in your ORDER BY clause is when the select list column you want to sort on contains a complicated expression, such as a CASE expression.
In that case, you should just alias the column, then use the alias in the ORDER BY rather than using ordinal position. Still allows you to change columns, saves having to rewrite the CASE
2 - your "numeric data sorting alphabetically" is misleading, that's not numeric data. Just because you're stuffing number characters into a string and calling it Number doesn't make it anything but character data. Character data should properly sort based on the value of the character, not the "intent" of the data. One more reason to store data in correct datatypes.
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"stewsterl 80804 (10/16/2009)I guess when you stop and try to understand the solution provided you not only learn, but save yourself some headaches when you need to make any slight changes."