Question:
How can I display the row number in the results of a SELECT query? For example:

 Select empname from employees where city = "toronto"

I would like to show the row number as follows:

   1 Fred  2 Bill  3 Jeff  4 June

Answer:
You are probably better off handling such formatting issues in your front-end. In T-SQL, you would first have to build a table that mimics what your result set looks like with the addition of an identity column:

 create table #result(   id int identity(1,1),   empname char(20))

Then insert your result set into the temporary table. Lastly, select out of the temporary result set.

I think you can see why a front-end should be able to handle this more easily.