MySQL get row position in ORDER BY

Question

With the following MySQL table:

+-----------------------------+
+ id INT UNSIGNED             +
+ name VARCHAR(100)           +
+----------------------------         


        

Answer 1

If the query is simple and the size of returned result set is potentially large, then you may try to split it into two queries.

The first query with a narrow-down filtering criteria just to retrieve data of that row, and the second query uses COUNT with WHERE clause to calculate the position.

For example in your case

Query 1:

SELECT * FROM tbl WHERE name = 'Beta'

Query 2:

SELECT COUNT(1) FROM tbl WHERE name >= 'Beta'

We use this approach in a table with 2M record and this is way more scalable than OMG Ponies's approach.