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 ...

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 ...

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