Order by with a Merge Join with Different Column Types in JBEDS not performing a conversion

Issue

• We have come across an issue with JBEDS with doing merge join between two datasets, where the join column is stored as a string in one database and an integer in another. The problem is that the federated query requires the sources to order the datasets before sending to JBEDS, and that one database will order alphabetically and the other will order numerically. Thus alphabetically 2 is greater than 100.
• Is this a bug in JBEDS? What is the recommended solution?