It seems that Vanilla Apache Hive 0.13 sorts in a yet another different way than what we expect and also differently from Cloudera Imapla (another Hive flavor).

SELECT BQT1.SmallA.StringNum FROM BQT1.SmallA order by BQT1.SmallA.StringNum

1: -1
2: -10
3: -11
4: -12
5: -13
6: -14
7: -15
8: -16
9: -17
10: -18
11: -19
12: -2
13: -20
14: -21
15: -22
16: -24
17: -3
18: -4
19: -5
20: -6
21: -8
22: -9
23: 0
24: 1
25: 10
26: 11
27: 12
28: 13
29: 14
30: 15
31: 16
32: 17
33: 18
34: 19
35: 2
36: 20
37: 21
38: 22
39: 23
40: 24
41: 3
42: 4
43: 5
44: 6
45: 7
46: 8
47: null
48: null
49: null
50: null