Question

How do I return a certain number of rows, that are a certain number of rows from the top of a SELECT query?

What I mean is, suppose I had a table with 1000 rows. Suppose I want the first 50 rows, then I want the second 50 rows, then the third 50 rows, and so on. I know that TOP or LIMIT will limit the number of rows that are returned, but I am unsure how to tell SQL to get me the rows from a certain point in the returned table.

Answer 1

In Sql server you can make use of ROW_NUMBER() function to do thing you want

SELECT ROW_NUMBER() OVER(ORDER BY col3 DESC) AS Row, 
    col1, col2, col3
FROM tablename

in short

WITH ctetable AS
(
    SELECT ROW_NUMBER() OVER(ORDER BY col3 DESC) AS RowNumber , 
        col1, col2, col3
    FROM tablename 
) 
SELECT * 
FROM ctetable 
WHERE RowNumber BETWEEN 1 AND 50;