The Tally table cannot be used to solve ranking problems because of the inherent cross-join. You've limited the cross-join, but only with a triangular join... half as bad but still very bad.

There's no such thing as "Physical Order" in a database. You can have an implied order based on an index, but unless it's a Clustered index, you can end up with the "merry-go-round" order that I spoke of in the Running Total article.

What is the Clustered index of the table, Karthik? If there isn't one and the MID column can't be used to establish the "natural" order (as you've already stated), this problem cannot be solved. Sorry...