In the case you have no natural partition value and just want an ordered number regardless of the partition you can just do a row_number over a constant, in the following example i've just used 'X'. Hope this helps someone
select
ROW_NUMBER() OVER(PARTITION BY num ORDER BY col1) as aliascol1,
period_next_id, period_name_long
from
(
select distinct col1, period_name_long, 'X' as num
from {TABLE}
) as x