Does Firebird contain a natural sort order algorithm of some kind? We have an alphanumeric field that we would like to sort in the following order:

1
10
100
1010
20
25
123aef
aef123

I tried using different character sets but was not able to find a resolution. I can't convert the values to numerics because there will be alphanumerics in the field. There is no standard type of values that I could substr out as well. Meaning we could have any type of alphanumerics.

I also tried LPad which was better but still did not give me the results that I needed.