Question

My sql database stores the highscores for the players of a game like this:

playerName
scores

To show the scores I’m trying to create a query that returns for a playerId “joe” the positon of joe as well as one player with more and less points than joe:

(rank) (playerName) (scores)
5000    luci       2001
5001    joe        1900
5002    marc       1750

(I added the rank here just to make it more clear. It isn’t stored and represents just the position in the list when sorting by the scores)
Is there a way to do soemthing like this with a query without getting half of the database as result?

Answer 1

You’d ideally want to be using window functions to do this, namely row_number(), lead() and lag().

These are not available in MySQL, but here are a few workarounds (also row_number(), picked up from the same author).

---

Using window functions:

with
players as (
select row_number() over w as rank,
       playername,
       scores
from players
window w (order by scores desc)
),
player as (
select rank
from players
where playername = 'joe'
)
select rank,
       playername,
       scores
from players
join player on players.rank between player.rank - 1 and player.rank + 1

Alternatively (slightly faster):

with
player_range as (
select scores - 100 as scores -- or whatever is large enough based on your stats
from players
where playername = 'joe'
),
players as (
select row_number() over w as rank,
       players.playername,
       players.scores
from players
join player_range
on player_range.scores <= players.scores
window w (order by scores desc)
),
player as (
select rank
from players
where playername = 'joe'
)
select rank,
       playername,
       scores
from players
join player on players.rank between player.rank - 1 and player.rank + 1