Question

Sorted on column Y

   X       Y        Z 
------------------------
|      |     A1  |     |
------------------------
|      |     B2  |     |
------------------------
|      |     C3  |     |
------------------------ -----Page 1
|      |     D3  |     |
------------------------
|      |     E4  |     |
------------------------
|      |     F5  |     |
------------------------ -----Page 2
|      |     G5  |     |
------------------------
|      |     F6  |     |
------------------------
|      |     G7  |     | -----Page 3  

User has option to enter wild card search, i.e. – “%5“

I would like to return to the user page 2 (as it has the first occurrence of something followed by 5.) OR find out how many rows there are before the column containing F5

(SQLite with C API)

Answer 1

Assuming MySQL, resultset ordered by X and X is unique:

SELECT  COUNT(*)
FROM    mytable
WHERE   X <
        (
        SELECT  X
        FROM    mytable
        WHERE   y LIKE '%5'
        ORDER BY
                X
        LIMIT 1
        )