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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-28T00:33:38+00:00

I have a simple table that contains unique identifiers and a counter value for

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I have a simple table that contains unique identifiers and a counter value for each of them. What I need to get as result is the position of a specific identifier after the table was sorted by the counter values.

My current solution would be to do a SELECT for all data while sorting the result, then going through the result list to find the required identifier, the position where I find it is the ranking value I want to get.

Unfortunately this requires much memory and computing time for large tables. So my question: is there a SQL statement that returns the position of a specific identifier after the table was sorted?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    If you’re using SQL Server 2005 and newer, you can use the RANK() or DENSE_RANK() windowing functions:

    SELECT
   (your list of columns here),
   RANK() OVER(ORDER BY yourcolumnnamehere)
FROM dbo.YourTable

    or:

    SELECT
   (your list of columns here),
   DENSE_RANK() OVER(ORDER BY yourcolumnnamehere)
FROM dbo.YourTable

    See explanation of difference between RANK and DENSE_RANK here

    Other RDBMS (like Oracle) also seem to support those windowing functions.

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