Ordinal number within a table

I am looking to populate my template loop by assigning it the entire resultset in one shot as follows:
 
my $str  = "SELECT \@row:=\@row+1 as row, <fields> FROM <tables> WHERE ...";
my $sth = $conn->prepare($st);
$sth->execute();
my $dataArr = $sth->fetchall_arrayref( {} );
$template->param(dataLoop => $dataArr);

I am getting NULL for row. The solution suggested by following thread does it for command line, but I need to run it from inside my perl script.

  http://lists.mysql.com/mysql/185626

a) SET @row=0;
b) SELECT (@row:=@row+1) AS row, ename, empno FROM emp ORDER BY empno;

And I don't know how to run both (a) and (b) together in one statement. Running just (b) is what is producing NULL for row.

Thanks for your help,
Nishi



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