That's what I would do.

Also make sure that you allow gaps in your current numbering to allow for additions in the future. (In other words, if you have
Panasonic, 1
Vizio, 2
Samsung, 3
Sony, 4
RCA, 5
You'll most likely have to do a lot of renumbering in the future if you want to add a new brand at the top spot.

or have a table which has brands and their position, eg column_brand_name column_sort_order

this way if you insert a new brand you only have to change the positions in one table, also you can easily change the positions for whatevr reason at any time but updating only one table

I always think that there is an easier way then the one I think of. Thank you for the help!

You can also use ORDER BY FIELD to accomplish this:

SELECT * FROM `products` ORDER BY FIELD( brand, 'Panasonic', 'Vizio', 'Samsung', [...]) ASC

well i never knew that, thanks whoisgregg

It ends up being really handy when the ranking of rows is based on something other than the data in the table itself. For example, if you want to rank products by a combination of factors in multiple tables (pageviews, recent sales, previously bought from current customer, etc.) then you can more easily do that in the scripting and just push an ordered list of ids. Pseudocode:

 SELECT * FROM `table` WHERE `id` IN ( $list_of_ids ) ORDER BY FIELD( id, $list_of_ids) ASC LIMIT 0,10

I just want to throw my vote out there for a new column called "sort_order"

I find when you want to change the order they appear in later that it is easier to change the value of the "sort_order" field than it is to find all the queries that use the "ORDER BY FIELD" logic and then change those queries.

Both are fine solutions, in my eyes one is easier to maintain.

absolutely whoisgregg i immediately saw some great things i could do with ORDER BY FIELD

especially multi table sorts where the data is not naturally (correctly) sorted in some kind of alphanemeric by default.

i've come from sqlserver and can't believe i've never used this method before, thanks!