Pseudo SQL code: 
SELECT  1 + COUNT(*) 
  FROM  student_data
 WHERE  grade > (SELECT  grade 
                   FROM  student_data
                  WHERE  name = "whatever")

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The principle being that someones rank is one more than the number of people that are better. I don't think MySQL supports nested SELECT statements, but you can always split the query into two. If you have an index on the 'grade' column (for simplicity, I assume such a column exists), the query should be pretty fast as the database doesn't need to do a table scan.

Abigail

In reply to Re: What's an Efficient Way to Retrieve a Rank from a MySQL Table? by Abigail-II
in thread What's an Efficient Way to Retrieve a Rank from a MySQL Table? by soon_j

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