JIRA lexorank explained
Why Stack Overflow recommends it
Stack Overflow users link it when answering how to store and reorder items like tasks or cards in a database, since it explains lexical ranking as an alternative to numeric positions.
Recommended by 2 people across 2 different months, 2019 to 2021.
What it is
A 16-minute walkthrough by Ahmad Azfar of LexoRank, the string-based ranking system Atlassian uses in JIRA Software to keep issues in a user-defined order. It covers how ranks are assigned between existing items and what happens when there is no room left between two values.
What people said
Recommends Rockiger · 2020-05 · Stack Overflow · on “Task list with re-ordering feature using Firebase/Firestore”
Solution 1 is the hardest to maintain. But is needed if you want to have a unique ranking of all your tasks over several lists. Atlassian uses this solution for Jira-Boards. Where all issues are ordered no matter in which list they appear. Interestingly they use lexical ordering which reduces the pain of rebasing a bit. They made an interesting video about it.https: [this video]
Recommends Kevin Kreps · 2020-10 · Stack Overflow · on “How to store ordered items which often change position in DB”
Another solution would be to use lexical ranking. Whenever there is no value between two strings, one would simply add a new character. The only disadvantage is, that it consumes more memory compared to a numerical solution, which are named in other answers. A normalization isn't necessary for an error free database, but can be optionally done to reduce the string lenght. Here is an interesting video, which explains it in detail: [this video]
Cites Alfe · 2019-03 · Stack Overflow · on “Jira's Lexorank algorithm for new stories”
We are talking about a special kind of indexing here. This is not sorting; it is just preparing items to end up in a certain order in case someone happens to sort them (by whatever sorting algorithm). I know that variants of this kind of indexing have been used in libraries for decades, maybe centuries, to ensure that books belonging together but lacking a common title end up next to each other in the shelves, but I have never heard of a name for it. The 8 is probably chosen wisely as a compromise, maybe even by analyzing typical use cases. Consider this: If you choose a small increment, e. g. 1, then all tickets will have ranks like [a, b, c, …] . This will be great if you create a lot of t
Cites valstu · 2021-02 · Stack Overflow · on “How to rearrange cards and lists like Trello?”
You could also use Lexorank algorithm. That's how Jira is handling their ordering of cards [this video] You can find multiple implementations of Lexorank in GitHub. Here's for example one simple JavaScript implementation of Lexorank [LINK]