Reverse EBCDIC sorts numbers before letters in ROW_NUMBER function

So I do have following SQL select

SELECT FOO.*, ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY KEY ASC) AS ROW_NUMBER
FROM FOO

Key is of the type VARCHAR(12). I wonder why the hell the numbers are sorted after the letters. Every other system including UTF-8 always begins with numbers.

So a solution you can do is to take advantage of the EBCDIC character order. Special characters are sorted before the letters!

If the numeric values are replaced, for example, like 0 -> .0, the sorting automatically works correctly. As this means there is no "conversion" to ASCII involved it's also not so expensive if a lot data is sorted.

And the query for that:

SELECT FOO.*, 
ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(KEY, '0', '.0'),'1', '.1'),'2', '.2'),'3', '.3'),'4', '.4'),'5', '.5'),'6', '.6'),'7', '.7'),'8', '.8'),'9', '.9') ASC) AS ROW_NUMBER
FROM FOO