I needed to implement an incrementing numeric field for a “reportOrder” field, couldn’t rely on the primary key because I will later be adding the facility to re-order the table based on this field.


SET @pos=0;
INSERT INTO myNewTable(someField, reportOrder)
SELECT fieldName, @pos:=@pos+1
FROM myOldTable
ORDER BY reportOrder;


All i’m doing is assigning the incremented variable value and at the same time reading it in the query. Like I said, nothing major just something I seem to need regularly and couldn’t find a rownum (oracle) equivilent for MySql