Question

I have a table full of documents with serial numbers – columns:

• docid int
• writing text
• submissionDate datetime

…and I’d like to find out where a particular serial number lies in a query against the table.

For example, if I ordered the resultset by submissionDate asc, I might want to know where document 34 is within that ordering (i.e. is it in position 11?)

How do I do this?

Answer 1

It looks like you’re trying to get the row number even if that’s not one of the rows being returned. You can use a CTE for that:

;WITH CTE AS
(
    SELECT
        docid,
        writing,
        submissionDate,
        ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY submissionDate) AS position
    FROM
        My_Table
)
SELECT
    docid,
    writing,
    submissionDate,
    position
FROM
    CTE
WHERE
    docid = 34

This also requires SQL Server 2005 or greater of course.