Question

I was wondering if you could do something like this is Microsoft SQL Server 2k8 R2

Say I have a query which returns 100 rows of data.

Is their a way I can pass in some variables for example @lower_limit and @upper_limit.

Then I want the query to record the rows between the lower and upper limit

For example:

@lower_limit = 5
@upper_limt  10

Would return me rows 5 – 10 from the 100 records.

Answer 1

You can assign a ROW_NUMBER() over your result set and then use the BETWEEN statement to limit the rows.

A contrived example:

WITH data AS
(
    SELECT
        ID
       ,YourColumn
       ,ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY ID) AS RowNum
    FROM
        YourTable
)
SELECT 
    *
FROM
    data
WHERE
    RowNum BETWEEN 5 AND 10

EDIT: For standard paging, here’s exactly the technique I use in all the applications I develop:

DECLARE @PageNumber int = /* The page number you want */
DECLARE @PageSize int = /* The number of records per page */
WITH paged AS
(
    SELECT
         ROW_NUMBER() OVER(ORDER BY [OrderByColumns]) AS RowNum
        ,*
    FROM
        [YourSource]
)
SELECT 
     [Column1]
    ,[Column2]
    ,...
FROM 
    paged
WHERE 
    RowNum BETWEEN (@PageNumber - 1) * @PageSize + 1 AND @PageNumber * @PageSize
ORDER BY 
    [OrderByColumns] -- Same as used in ROW_NUMBER()