James, one option would be to run a query to find the number of people in the list ahead of him, rather than determining position within the result set.
As in: SELECT COUNT(*) FROM some_table WHERE state = "Maine" AND hire_date < (SELECT hire_date FROM some_table WHERE last_name = "Smith" AND first_name = "Joe" AND state = "Maine") Dan
On Mar 22, 2007, at 11:21 AM, James Tu wrote: > > > Is there some quick way to do the following in MySQL? (I know I > > can use PHP to search through the result set, but I wanted to see > > if there's a quick way using some sort of query) > > > > Let's say I know that Joe is from Maine. > > I want to do a query of all employees from Maine, ordered > by hiring > > date, and figure out where Joe falls in that list. (i.e. which > > record number is he?) > > > > -James
