On Sun, Oct 18, 2009 at 12:00 PM, Raymond O'Donnell <rod@xxxxxx> wrote: > On 18/10/2009 11:30, Alban Hertroys wrote: > >> Short of enumerating those results in your application, the easiest >> approach is probably to wrap your query in a join with generate_series >> like so: >> >> SELECT a, s.b >> FROM ( >> SELECT a >> FROM table1 >> ORDER BY a DESC LIMIT 5 >> ) AS t1, generate_series(5, 1, -1) AS s(b) >> > > Won't that just give you the cartesian product of the two sets? I tried > something similar yesterday out of curiosity, and that's what I got. > > The only things I can think of are (i) as you say, enumerate the results > in the application or (ii) use a temporary sequence as someone else > suggested. yeah, the above gives a cartesian product. Row number is really the way to go here. Using pre window tactics, it looks like we need: select a, b from ( select a, nextval('c') as b from ( SELECT a, FROM table1 ORDER BY a DESC LIMIT 5 ) q order by a ) q order by a desc; aside: it's never a good idea to write queries like this: select func(), foo from bar order by foo limit x; if you are concerned about how many times foo executes. This is a huge gotcha that constantly comes up on the lists. see the warning here: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/interactive/explicit-locking.html#ADVISORY-LOCKS merlin -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general