How to add a row number to result set?

You can order by more than one field. And setup a counter var.

@jlrdw But how to setup counter var?

Before foreach

$k =0;

Inside the for each

$k = $k + 1;

Now make k one of your columns.

So I cannot get the order of Jane Doe without getting the whole result set and I have to construct foreach and go one record by one in PHP? SQL has something like this:

SELECT competitor.finish_time, competitor.name, number = ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY competitor.finish_time)

But the OP does not want to iterate over the collection - instead wants to find a named competition and get their position in the collection:

$name = 'Jane Doe';
$competitiors = Competitor::where('sex','w')->orderBy('finish_time')->get();
$position = $competitiors->search(function ($person, $key) use ($name) {
    return $person->name == $name;
});

return $position + 1; //since it will be a zero-indexed collection

@tykus_ikus It is nice but it is still iteration over result set - I would like to have something to ask DB directly - if it is possible - simply how to ask: What was the order of Jane Doe among women?

If you are just hitting a single competitor in the query then your solution will be database-specific - as you say SQL has a ROW_NUMBER() function, but this is not available in MySQL (is this your DB of choice here?)

yes MySQL... so Eloquent cannot address this since it is not common in various SQLs to ask on the result order in result set...

A DB::select type query is necessary in this case - there are a number of articles like this which show you how to emulate the ROW_NUMBER() functionality in MySQL