Reverse the “natural order” of a MySQL table without ORDER BY?

Question

I\'m dealing with a legacy database table that has no insertion date column or unique id column, however the natural order of insertion is still valid when examined with a s

Answer 1

Use @rownum in your query to number each row and then order by the @rownum desc. Here's an example.

select @rownum:=@rownum+1 ‘rank’, p.* from player p, (SELECT @rownum:=0) r order by score desc limit 10;

Finally, beware that relying on the current order being returned long-term isn't recommended.