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Asked: 2026-05-10T13:44:46+00:00

I’m interested in learning some (ideally) database agnostic ways of selecting the n th

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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?

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  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.

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