Question about combining two DB records into one ASP Table

[richardson]

Guys,

Not sure if this is a SQL specific question or an ASP question so please move this if it is in the wrong place.

Here is the problem I am presented with. The client has two tables, one for payments and one for receipts that are identical. They need me to pull the data from both tables and build a ledger so that the data is sorted by date descending.

It will be displayed in the following format:

Date - Detail Payment Receipt Balance

Depending on whether the value is positive or negative, it goes in the appropriate column. Can I combine the call from the two tables into one SQL call or do I need to read the two tables into two arrays and sort the arrays?

To make matters worse, the "dates" are stored as 8 digit 20030506 in the database and are stored in STRING form. Can I write a SQL Query that uses substrings to put the date in the correct order and do a sort on these dates?
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