MySQL get row position in ORDER BY

Use this:

SELECT x.id, 
       x.position,
       x.name
  FROM (SELECT t.id,
               t.name,
               @rownum := @rownum + 1 AS position
          FROM TABLE t
          JOIN (SELECT @rownum := 0) r
      ORDER BY t.name) x
 WHERE x.name = 'Beta'

...to get a unique position value. This:

SELECT t.id,
       (SELECT COUNT(*)
          FROM TABLE x
         WHERE x.name <= t.name) AS position,
       t.name    
  FROM TABLE t      
 WHERE t.name = 'Beta'

...will give ties the same value. IE: If there are two values at second place, they'll both have a position of 2 when the first query will give a position of 2 to one of them, and 3 to the other...

This is the only way that I can think of:

SELECT `id`,
       (SELECT COUNT(*) FROM `table` WHERE `name` <= 'Beta') AS `position`,
       `name`
FROM `table`
WHERE `name` = 'Beta'

If the query is simple and the size of returned result set is potentially large, then you may try to split it into two queries.

The first query with a narrow-down filtering criteria just to retrieve data of that row, and the second query uses COUNT with WHERE clause to calculate the position.

For example in your case

Query 1:

SELECT * FROM tbl WHERE name = 'Beta'

Query 2:

SELECT COUNT(1) FROM tbl WHERE name >= 'Beta'

We use this approach in a table with 2M record and this is way more scalable than OMG Ponies's approach.

The other answers seem too complicated for me.

Here comes an easy example, let's say you have a table with columns:

userid | points

and you want to sort the userids by points and get the row position (the "ranking" of the user), then you use:

SET @row_number = 0;

SELECT 
    (@row_number:=@row_number + 1) AS num, userid, points
FROM
    ourtable
ORDER BY points DESC

num gives you the row postion (ranking).

If you have MySQL 8.0+ then you might want to use ROW_NUMBER()