How best to get someone's 'rank' from a scores table with php and mysql without looping

Question

My table will hold scores and initials.

But the table wont be ordered.

I can get the total row count easy enough and I know I can get all of them and Order B

Answer 1

See this answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/8684441/125816

In short, you can do something like this:

SELECT id, (@next_rank := IF(@score <> score, 1, 0)) nr, 
           (@score := score) score, (@r := IF(@next_rank = 1, @r + 1, @r)) rank 
FROM rank, (SELECT @r := 0) dummy1
ORDER BY score DESC;

And it will produce a result like this:

+------+----+-------+------+
| id   | nr | score | rank |
+------+----+-------+------+
|    2 |  1 |    23 |    1 |
|    4 |  1 |    17 |    2 |
|    1 |  0 |    17 |    2 |
|    5 |  1 |    10 |    3 |
|    3 |  1 |     2 |    4 |
+------+----+-------+------+

Note that users with equal scores have equal ranks. :-)