SQL Server SELECT LAST N Rows

Question

You can get SQL server to select the last N rows with the following query:

select * from tbl_name order by id desc limit N;

I tested JonVD's code, but found it was very slow, 6s.

This code took 0s.

SELECT TOP(5) ORDERID, CUSTOMERID, OrderDate    
FROM Orders where EmployeeID=5    
Order By OrderDate DESC

You can do it by using the ROW NUMBER BY PARTITION Feature also. A great example can be found here:

I am using the Orders table of the Northwind database... Now let us retrieve the Last 5 orders placed by Employee 5:

SELECT ORDERID, CUSTOMERID, OrderDate
FROM
(
    SELECT ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY EmployeeID ORDER BY OrderDate DESC) AS OrderedDate,*
    FROM Orders
) as ordlist

WHERE ordlist.EmployeeID = 5
AND ordlist.OrderedDate <= 5

If you want to select last numbers of rows from a table.

Syntax will be like

 select * from table_name except select top 
 (numbers of rows - how many rows you want)* from table_name

These statements work but differrent ways. thank you guys.

 select * from Products except select top (77-10) * from Products

in this way you can get last 10 rows but order will show descnding way

select top 10 * from products
 order by productId desc 

---

 select * from products
 where productid in (select top 10 productID from products)
 order by productID desc

---

 select * from products where productID not in 
 (select top((select COUNT(*) from products ) -10 )productID from products)

In a very general way and to support SQL server here is

SELECT TOP(N) *
FROM tbl_name
ORDER BY tbl_id DESC

and for the performance, it is not bad (less than one second for more than 10,000 records On Server machine)

First you most get record count from

 Declare @TableRowsCount Int
 select @TableRowsCount= COUNT(*) from <Your_Table>

And then :

In SQL Server 2012

SELECT *
FROM  <Your_Table> As L
ORDER BY L.<your Field>
OFFSET <@TableRowsCount-@N> ROWS
FETCH NEXT @N ROWS ONLY;

In SQL Server 2008

SELECT *
FROM 
(
SELECT ROW_NUMBER() OVER(ORDER BY ID) AS sequencenumber, *
FROM  <Your_Table>
    Order By <your Field>
) AS TempTable
WHERE sequencenumber > @TableRowsCount-@N 

Is "Id" indexed? If not, that's an important thing to do (I suspect it is already indexed).

Also, do you need to return ALL columns? You may be able to get a substantial improvement in speed if you only actually need a smaller subset of columns which can be FULLY catered for by the index on the ID column - e.g. if you have a NONCLUSTERED index on the Id column, with no other fields included in the index, then it would have to do a lookup on the clustered index to actually get the rest of the columns to return and that could be making up a lot of the cost of the query. If it's a CLUSTERED index, or a NONCLUSTERED index that includes all the other fields you want to return in the query, then you should be fine.