Thank you all for your valuable suggestions. I would evaluate each of this and I think the one padding or the order by lenghth and the data will eventually be...

Yes I am only the concerned about sorting for numeric values in the column but if it contains alpha Numeric then sorting can take any course of action.

~D

333233343MVF is such example. Until now I have seen only alphabets and numbers but not any special characters. Beside the value I receive is from an external source so I...

I am not sure if the padding helps. Because I need to know the length of Trade Reference field in order to pad the field. This is varchar field of...