title: Sorting/ordering in MySQL
body: <p>I'm having a little problem with trying to sort the contents of a table <code>programs</code> by the column <code>prog_id</code> which holds the id of each program in the following format:</p>
  
  <h2>prog_id</h2>
  
  <p>1.0.1, 1.0.2, 1.0.3, ..., 1.0.10, 1.0.11, ..., 1.1.0, 1.1.1 etc</p>
  
  <p>When I sort by prog_id i get</p>
  
  <p>1.0.1, 1.0.10, 1.0.11, 1.0.2, 1.0.3 ...</p>
  
  <p>which is correct as far as MySQL goes but not correct for the order in which the data should display.
  I tried using another column, <code>orderby</code> in which I could save an index and order by that but I would have to enter the values manually and there are a few thousand rows in my table which would take quite a long time to do.</p>
  
  <p>Any tricks I could use to get my data to display in the "proper" order? BTW, I'm using PHP &amp; MySQL.</p>