Recently a question popped up over on the CakePHP google group where someone had a problem sorting on a column of "registration numbers". This was his table sorted order by "Reg No ASC":

ID	Name	Reg No
1	Product A	1
2	Product B	123
3	Product C	2

1, 123, 2. That's not correct right? Well it is if we are sorting strings! The problem here is that MySQL will not do a "natural sort" on a text type column like char, varchar, or text. The solution to this is to change the column type to a numeric value, especially considering he is storing numbers anyway! Once you change "Reg No" to int, the column will sort correctly.

ID	Name	Reg No
1	Product A	1
3	Product C	2
2	Product B	123

Always remember to check your schema!