After confirming with the SQL Server DBA that a CLR function would be permitted on the production SQL Server, I wrote the function that appears in Listing 1. You'll notice it uses the Microsoft.Net ...

CLR functions that perform string manipulation and substring extraction perform very well in SQL Server.

For a wholly numeric one, the kind is 1; for other ones, it's kind 2. When retrieving data that you want to sort, order by the kind of serial, then the serial - e.g. SELECT * FROM tblFoo ORDER BY ...