Question

Say I have table with two columns: Name, Age.

I want to design a query that will return the names and ages sorted by age, but to also have an additional column which will run from 1 to N (the last row).

So for a table with the following rows:

John, 28 Jim, 30 Mike, 28 

The following rows will be returned

John, 28, 1 Mike, 28, 2 Jim, 30, 3 

How can I do this? (I’m using MySQL, btw, if it makes a diff).

Answer 1

In mysql you can:

SELECT Row,Name,Age FROM (SELECT @row := @row + 1 AS Row, Name,Age FROM table1 )  As derived1 

However , this next approach is generic (but you need to have unique values in one of the columns of the table , in this example I’ve used name but it could be any unique column)

   select rank=count(*), a1.name, a1.age    from table1 a1, table1 a2    where a1.name >= a2.name    group by a1.name , a1.age    order by rank