Establish the order of some values - php

Question

I have a series of queries that find out what is the best position every user had over a series of events (note: all users have the same $points_pos, so I am looking at a discriminating value). The query is looped for every user.
$max=$amount+1;
$i=1;
$highestsofar="99";
$numpointsall = "SELECT driver, position FROM standings_drivers WHERE season='42' AND points='$points_pos'";
$numall = mysql_query($numpointsall);
while ($i<$max) {
while ($row = mysql_fetch_row($numall)) {
$driver_id = $row[0];
$posvar = "SELECT position FROM results WHERE compId='$compId' AND driverId='$driver_id' AND eventID>='$firstevent' AND eventID<='$lastevent' AND (eventSession!='T' AND eventSession!='P' AND eventSession!='Q' AND eventSession!='Q1' AND eventSession!='Q2' AND eventSession!='QA') ORDER BY position ASC LIMIT 1";
$posres = mysql_query($posvar);
while ($row = mysql_fetch_row($posres)) {
$highestpos = $row[0];
}
$i++;
}
}
Having established the $highestpos for each of the $driver_id, how can I arrange them in order of best position (that is, the ones with the lowest $highestpos)?
Ideally, I want to achieve something that tells me:
$driver_id = 1
$driver_id = 2 etc
so that I can amend a table by putting them in the correct order of position.
EDIT: additional info
The results table look like this:
ID compId eventId eventSession driverId position
1 2 739 R 563 7
2 2 739 R 903 1
3 2 562 R 874 16
...
In the case above, assuming that 739 and 562 are the IDs of events in the range, I would like to order the three users in driverId as follows:
903 = 1st
563 = 2nd
874 = 3rd
Thank you for your help!

Answer 1

One thing about SQL is that it's typically much better than you (or I) are at getting data. The developers and architects for Microsoft, Oracle, etc. have spent a great deal of time and effort working on the best ways to select data, so trying to duplicate their efforts (like looping over results and getting values, etc.) is usually a mistake.
All of your code can likely be replaced with a single SQL query:
SELECT
SD.driver,
MIN(R.position) AS highest_position
FROM
Standings_Drivers SD
INNER JOIN Results R ON
R.driver = SD.driver AND
R.compId = ? AND
eventID >= ? AND
eventID <= ? AND
eventSession NOT IN ('T', 'P', 'Q', 'Q1', 'Q2', 'QA')
WHERE
SD.season = '42' AND -- Should this really be a string and not an integer?
SD.points = ?
GROUP BY
SD.driver
ORDER BY
MIN(R.position)
The question marks are where you would pass in your various parameters. Make sure that you're are executing this as a parameterized query and not just building up a complete string. I don't program in PHP, so I don't know the syntax for that. Googling for "sql injection php" should help you out there though.