How to determine position of row in sql result-set?

Question

i have a sql query:

select id, name from table order by name

result looks like this:

52 arnold 
33 berta 
34 chris 
47 dori         


        

Answer 1

You don't mention which RDBMS you're running, but if you're using SQL Server 2005 or greater, you can employ the ROW_NUMBER() function - like this:

SELECT id, name, ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY name) AS RowNumber
FROM   MyTable

Then, to fetch a given row, you can use a derived table or a common table expression - like this:

;WITH NumberedRows
AS
(SELECT id, name, ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY name) AS RowNumber
FROM    MyTable)
SELECT RowNumber FROM NumberedRows WHERE id = 47

To sort out "which page" the record is on, you would need to divide the row number by the number of records per page, and round up to the nearest integer.