Ranking in MySQL results

A friend of me asked me long time ago: "How can I have a ranking on a result with MySQL?". Now I found some time to write it down:

Lets do first some preparation for the example:

CREATE TABLE sales (
  id     INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY
, fruit  VARCHAR(32)
, amount DECIMAL
);

INSERT INTO sales
VALUES (NULL, 'apple', 12.75), (NULL, 'orange', 1.89), (NULL, 'pear', 19.23)
     , (NULL, 'banana', 4.25), (NULL, 'cherry', 123.75), (NULL, 'plum', 23.15)
;

Now lets query:

SELECT fruit, amount
  FROM sales
 ORDER BY amount DESC
;

+--------+--------+
| fruit  | amount |
+--------+--------+
| cherry |    124 |
| plum   |     23 |
| pear   |     19 |
| apple  |     13 |
| banana |      4 |
| orange |      2 |
+--------+--------+

Hmmmm...., this not yet what we want!

And now with ranking:

SET @rank=0;

SELECT @rank:=@rank+1 AS rank, fruit, amount
  FROM sales
 ORDER BY amount DESC
;

+------+--------+--------+
| rank | fruit  | amount |
+------+--------+--------+
|    1 | cherry |    124 |
|    2 | plum   |     23 |
|    3 | pear   |     19 |
|    4 | apple  |     13 |
|    5 | banana |      4 |
|    6 | orange |      2 |
+------+--------+--------+

Much better!

An other possibility would be, to do the whole ranking in the application (on the application server).

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