Question

I recently created a scoring system where the users are ordered by their points on descending basis. First I used to store ranks in a column of its own. I used to run this loop to update the rank:

$i = 1;
    $numberOfRows = mysql_query('SELECT COUNT(`id`) FROM sector0_players');
    $scoreboardquery = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM sector0_players ORDER BY points DESC");
    while(($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($scoreboardquery)) || $i<=$numberOfRows){
        $scoreid = $row['id'];
        $mysql_qeury = mysql_query("UPDATE sector0_players SET scoreboard_rank = '$i' WHERE id = '$scoreid'");
    $i++;
    }

And it was really hard, not to mention slow to actually run this on a huge amount of users.
Instead, I tried to construct a query and ended up with this.

SET @rownum := 0;
SELECT scoreboard_rank, id, points
FROM (
SELECT @rownum := @rownum + 1 AS scoreboard_rank, id, points FROM sector0_players ORDER BY points DESC
)
as result WHERE id = '1';

But, this is just a select statement. Is there anyway I could get around it and change it so that it updates the table just as the loop does?

Answer 1

Please try using the following query :

set @rownum:=0;
update sector0_players set scoreboard_rank=@rownum:=@rownum+1 ORDER BY points DESC;

PHP code can be ,

mysql_query("set @rownum:=0;");
mysql_query("update sector0_players set scoreboard_rank=@rownum:=@rownum+1 ORDER BY points DESC;");