Well, I'll just address your sorting question/issue--- you can sort on the catalogue number by dividing each one into 3 components: leading non-digits (if any), digits, trailing non-digits (if any) ... and then defining the sort routine to sort on these components. Here's an off the cuff Schwartzian Transform applied to the data: 

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my @list = qw/715b E9 715a 614 715 C18 1 4 12a 12/;
my @sorted = map{$_->[0]}
             sort{$a->[1] cmp $b->[1] ||
                  $a->[2] <=> $b->[2] ||
                  $a->[3] cmp $b->[3]}
             map{[$_,/(\D*)(\d+)(\D*)/]} @list;

print join("\n", @sorted),"\n";

[download]

Knowing how to sort on catalogue numbers should relieve you of the need to use a special sort N field in the data. Having said that, you might also want to look into the DB_File dbm system which has a BTREE mode for keeping entries in sorted order (you can provide a comparison routine), and it has facilities for matching partial keys which can be used to code for retrieving ranges.

In reply to Re: Database Structure/Sorting/Displaying by danger
in thread Database Structure/Sorting/Displaying by Stamp_Guy

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