Sort by month expressed by a string in SQL

Question

I have the following sorting problem in SQL.

SELECT time, orderValue
FROM orders
ORDER BY time

The issue is that time is expressed by a string in the following format:

May 2012

June 2012

...

June 2013

The ORDER BY clause however sorts the problem in an alphabetic order (which is not strange since it's defined as a string). How to sort this in a correct order based on year and month?

Answer 1

Try:

SELECT time, orderValue
FROM orders
ORDER BY CONVERT (DATETIME, '01 ' + time, 104)