Can I get the position of a record in a SQL result table?

Question

If I do something like

SELECT * FROM mytable ORDER BY mycolumn ASC;

I get a result table in a specific order.

Is there a way in SQL

Answer 1

You can count the number of records where the value that you are sorting on has a lower value than the record that you know the key value of:

select count(*)
from mytable
where mycolumn < (select mycolumn from mytable where key = 42)