How to select the nth row in a SQL database table?

Question

I'm interested in learning some (ideally) database agnostic ways of selecting the nth row from a database table. It would also be interesting to see how this can be achieved using the native functionality of the following databases:

• SQL Server
• MySQL
• PostgreSQL
• SQLite
• Oracle

I am currently doing something like the following in SQL Server 2005, but I'd be interested in seeing other's more agnostic approaches:

WITH Ordered AS ( SELECT ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY OrderID) AS RowNumber, OrderID, OrderDate FROM Orders) SELECT * FROM Ordered WHERE RowNumber = 1000000 

Credit for the above SQL: Firoz Ansari's Weblog

Update: See Troels Arvin's answer regarding the SQL standard. Troels, have you got any links we can cite?

Answer 1

There are ways of doing this in optional parts of the standard, but a lot of databases support their own way of doing it.

A really good site that talks about this and other things is http://troels.arvin.dk/db/rdbms/#select-limit.

Basically, PostgreSQL and MySQL supports the non-standard:

SELECT... LIMIT y OFFSET x  

Oracle, DB2 and MSSQL supports the standard windowing functions:

SELECT * FROM (   SELECT     ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY key ASC) AS rownumber,     columns   FROM tablename ) AS foo WHERE rownumber <= n 

(which I just copied from the site linked above since I never use those DBs)

Update: As of PostgreSQL 8.4 the standard windowing functions are supported, so expect the second example to work for PostgreSQL as well.

Update: SQLite added window functions support in version 3.25.0 on 2018-09-15 so both forms also work in SQLite.