Question

I have a complex query that requires a rank in it. I’ve learned that the standard way of doing that is by using the technique found on this page: http://thinkdiff.net/mysql/how-to-get-rank-using-mysql-query/. I’m using Infobright as the back end and it doesn’t work quite as expected. That is, while a standard MySQL engine would show the rank as 1, 2, 3, 4, etc… Brighthouse (Infobright’s engine) would return 1, 1, 1, 1, etc…. So I came up with a strategy of setting a variable, a function, and then execute it in the query. Here’s a proof of concept query that does just that:

SET @rank = 0;

DROP FUNCTION IF EXISTS __GetRank;
DELIMITER $$
CREATE FUNCTION __GetRank() RETURNS INT
BEGIN
    SET @rank = @rank + 1;
    return @rank;
END$$

DELIMITER ;

select __GetRank() AS rank, id from accounts;

I then copied and pasted the function into Jasper Report’s iReport and then compiled my report. After executing it, I get syntax errors. So I thought that perhaps the ; was throwing it off. So at the top of the query, I put in DELIMITER ;. This did not work either.

Is what I’m wanting to do even possible? If so, how? And if there’s an Infobright way of getting a rank without writing a function, I’d be open to that too.

Answer 1

Here’s how I solved this. I had my server side program execute a mysql script. I then took the output and converted it to a CSV. I then used this as the input data for my report. A little convoluted, but it works.