Contractors

[ichabod801]

Technically, they are. Adding two of these doesn't yield an interesting result. They are just strings restricted to contain only digits, like postal codes and phone numbers. This doesn't mean they can't have proper code to retrieve them...

Well, this is true. If they had had something to handle the sorting and it wouldn't have been too much of a problem, within that one database. Really, putting a leading 0 in would have solved most of the problems, although it would have been a conceptual shift for the analysts to remember that '132' is now '0132'. The thing that gets me about it is that the did have numeric product codes in the new database. For the numeric ID on that table the created a whole new set of numeric codes, and then put the old numeric ID in as a string.