I went through your suggestion and here are my comments:

Assuming we have the following data:

student - score
a - 70
b - 70
c - 70
d - 60
e - 50

problem: we need to determine the rank for student d

From your above suggestion, the result of your query would be "4" (meaning you are the fourth in the list). However since students a, b, and c have same grades, they should all be ranked as "first" while student "d" should be ranked as "second".

However, your suggestion is very fast and extremely useful if we present the result this way ... "There are 4 students that have higher scores!".

Would the "SELECT" command return the number of rows returned? If so, we can slightly modify your above suggestion to return results GROUPed by the scores. If the scores are grouped, the modified query would return only 1 row since only the score of 70 is greater than 60. If rank is one more than the number of results that are better, then the rank is correctly reported as "2".

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

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