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N039-E2 Tier 3 · Intermediate · easy ecommerce · Brightlane

Return the ID, name, and price of every product, plus the product's rank by `price` in descending order

Part of ROW_NUMBER, RANK, DENSE_RANK in SQL

The problem

Brightlane's product catalog ranks items by price from highest to lowest.

Write a query to return the ID, name, and price of every product, plus the product's rank by price in descending order.

Assumptions:

  • The products table has one row per product with an id, a name, and a price.
  • Rank 1 goes to the highest-priced product, with rank values increasing as price decreases.
  • Products with the same price receive the same rank. The next rank value after a tie is adjusted upward by the number of tied products, so rank values may have gaps.

Output:

  • One row per product, with columns id, name, price, and price_rank.
Schema · ecommerce 5 tables
categories
id integer
name text
parent_id? integer
products
id integer
name text
category_id integer
price numeric
stock_qty integer
attributes? jsonb
order_items
id integer
order_id integer
product_id integer
quantity integer
unit_price numeric
customers
id integer
name text
email text
city? text
country text
created_at timestamptz
is_active boolean
orders
id integer
customer_id integer
ordered_at timestamptz
status text
total_amount numeric
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Solution query
SELECT
  id,
  name,
  price,
  RANK() OVER (
    ORDER BY
      price DESC
  ) AS price_rank
FROM
  products

The shape

RANK() OVER (ORDER BY price DESC) assigns the same rank to products that tie on price and then skips ahead so the next rank reflects the number of rows that came before it. A price list with two items tied at the top would read 1, 1, 3, ..., not 1, 1, 2, ....

Clause by clause

  • SELECT id, name, price, RANK() OVER (ORDER BY price DESC) AS price_rank returns each product's ID, name, price, and its competitive rank. The window's ORDER BY price DESC defines the descending price order inside which the rank is computed; without PARTITION BY, the whole catalog is one window.
  • FROM products reads the product catalog.

Why RANK and not ROW_NUMBER

ROW_NUMBER would give each tied product a different number even though their prices are identical, which understates the tie. RANK carries the tie through to the output and the gap after the tie communicates how many products sat at the higher price. The gap is informative: a product showing price_rank = 5 means four products are strictly more expensive than it, regardless of whether some of those four are tied with each other.

The trap

The gap after a tie is not a bug. A reader expecting consecutive integers 1, 2, 3, ... will see 1, 1, 3, ... and assume rank 2 is missing. It is not missing; it is the tie. If the consumer wants consecutive integers across ties, DENSE_RANK is the function for that. The two functions answer different questions about ties, and the choice between them is load-bearing.

You practiced RANK() OVER (ORDER BY ...) — tied rows share the same rank; the sequence skips ahead by the number of tied rows, leaving gaps.

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