TSQL RowNum from Oracle equivalent, and the PhysLoc column

I was looking for the Row_Number() sintax on Internet:

SELECT *, ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY [column name]) as rowNum

FROM [table name]

order by ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY [column name])

And I have found this, as a gift:

SELECT  id, %%PhysLoc%% from dbo.A ORDER BY %%PhysLoc%%;

                                             

In Oracle we used to use something like that to improve performance in updates, specially in non-normalized tables where PK was not set yet, and sometimes better than a PK index.