ORDER BY function not working in Oracle

Question

I'm using the ORDER BY function as per below to order a simple query by customer id (it was originally party age but that didn't seem to work so I changed it to see if it was the syntax or not).

SELECT   customer_id, customer_name, party_age
FROM     customer
ORDER BY customer_id

The report returns no errors, but when I go to view the report it is not ordered at all. I have tried this using numbers as well (ORDER BY x).

Anyone guide me in the right direction?

EDIT: Customer_id is VARCHAR2(3) with 10 sample data fields ranging from 001 to 010. I have tried converting to an int as suggested below but the results are still the same.

Answer 1

Order by works in Oracle. The problem must be that the results you are getting are different from what you expect.

A typical reason for this would be a number that is represented as a string. This would order things as 1, 10, 100, 101, 102 . . . which does not look correct, if you are expecting numeric ordering.

My guess is that the following would work:

 order by cast(customer_id as int)