Are you saying "First Name Surname" all make up one column? Or are they in seperate columns? Seperate columns would be really easy to sort on. String manipulations can be taxing on a database, but if you had to, you could count the spaces in the name or use regular expressions (available in MySQL), or something like that. It'll make your SQL code pretty ugly, but I think it can be done depending on what DB you're using and which functions you're comfy working with.
