LIMIT 10..20 in SQL Server

Question

For SQL Server 2012 + you can use.

SELECT  *
FROM     sys.databases
ORDER BY name 
OFFSET  5 ROWS 
FETCH NEXT 5 ROWS ONLY 

The LIMIT clause is not part of standard SQL. It's supported as a vendor extension to SQL by MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite.

Other brands of database may have similar features (e.g. TOP in Microsoft SQL Server), but these don't always work identically.

It's hard to use TOP in Microsoft SQL Server to mimic the LIMIT clause. There are cases where it just doesn't work.

The solution you showed, using ROW_NUMBER() is available in Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and later. This is the best solution (for now) that works solely as part of the query.

Another solution is to use TOP to fetch the first count + offset rows, and then use the API to seek past the first offset rows.

See also:

• "Emulate MySQL LIMIT clause in Microsoft SQL Server 2000"
• "Paging of Large Resultsets in ASP.NET"

as you found, this is the preferred sql server method:

SELECT * FROM ( 
  SELECT *, ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY name) as row FROM sys.databases 
 ) a WHERE a.row > 5 and a.row <= 10

If you are using SQL Server 2012+ vote for Martin Smith's answer and use the OFFSET and FETCH NEXT extensions to ORDER BY,

If you are unfortunate enough to be stuck with an earlier version, you could do something like this,

WITH Rows AS
(
    SELECT
              ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY [dbo].[SomeColumn]) [Row]
            , *
        FROM
              [dbo].[SomeTable]
)
SELECT TOP 10
          *
     FROM
         Rows
    WHERE Row > 10

I believe is functionaly equivalent to

SELECT * FROM SomeTable LIMIT 10 OFFSET 10 ORDER BY SomeColumn

and the best performing way I know of doing it in TSQL, before MS SQL 2012.

---

If there are very many rows you may get better performance using a temp table instead of a CTE.