Are you sure that link gives you what you need? I looked and it didn't look like the same problem.
This should work as long as the leftmost characters in your string are digits.
WITH SampleData (BipolarNumbers) AS (
SELECT '1'
UNION ALL SELECT '100231-A'
UNION ALL SELECT '1003'
UNION ALL SELECT '11'
UNION ALL SELECT '11342'
UNION ALL SELECT '11342-A'
UNION ALL SELECT '12')
SELECT BipolarNumbers
FROM SampleData
ORDER BY CAST(LEFT(BipolarNumbers
,CASE PATINDEX('%[^0-9]%', BipolarNumbers)
WHEN 0 THEN LEN(BipolarNumbers)
ELSE PATINDEX('%[^0-9]%', BipolarNumbers) - 1 END) AS INT)
My thought question: Have you ever been told that your query runs too fast?
My advice:
INDEXing a poor-performing query is like putting sugar on cat food. Yeah, it probably tastes better but are you sure you want to eat it?
The path of least resistance can be a slippery slope. Take care that fixing your fixes of fixes doesn't snowball and end up costing you more than fixing the root cause would have in the first place.
Need to UNPIVOT? Why not CROSS APPLY VALUES instead?[/url]
Since random numbers are too important to be left to chance, let's generate some![/url]
Learn to understand recursive CTEs by example.[/url]
[url url=http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/St