MySQL - creating a user-defined function for a custom sort

Question

I\'m working with a large set of legacy data (converted from a flat-file db), where a field is formatted as the last 2 digits of the year the record was entered, followed by

Answer 1

You have some problems with your substrings, and the cast to int at the end makes it sort values with more digits at the end, not by year. This should work better;

DELIMITER //

CREATE FUNCTION custom_sort(id VARCHAR(8))
    RETURNS VARCHAR(10)
    READS SQL DATA
    DETERMINISTIC
    BEGIN
        DECLARE year VARCHAR(2);
        DECLARE balance VARCHAR(6);
        DECLARE stringValue VARCHAR(10);
        SET year = SUBSTRING(id, 1, 2);
        SET balance = SUBSTRING(id, 3, 6);
        IF(year <= 96) THEN
            SET stringValue = CONCAT('20', year, balance);
        ELSE
            SET stringValue = CONCAT('19', year, balance);
        END IF;
        RETURN stringValue;
    END//

DELIMITER ;

This can be simplified a bit to;

DELIMITER //

CREATE FUNCTION custom_sort(id VARCHAR(8))
    RETURNS varchar(10)
    DETERMINISTIC
    BEGIN
        IF(SUBSTRING(id, 1, 2) <= '96') THEN
            RETURN CONCAT('20', id);
        ELSE
            RETURN CONCAT('19', id);
        END IF;
    END//

DELIMITER ;