Question

There is a simple way to get top N rows from any table:

SELECT TOP 10 * FROM MyTable ORDER BY MyColumn 

Is there any efficient way to query M rows starting from row N

For example,

Id Value 1    a 2    b 3    c 4    d 5    e 6    f 

And query like this

SELECT [3,2] * FROM MyTable ORDER BY MyColumn /* hypothetical syntax */ 

queries 2 rows starting from 3d row, i.e 3d and 4th rows are returned.

Answer 1

UPDATE If you you are using SQL 2012 new syntax was added to make this really easy. See Implement paging (skip / take) functionality with this query

I guess the most elegant is to use the ROW_NUMBER function (available from MS SQL Server 2005):

WITH NumberedMyTable AS (     SELECT         Id,         Value,         ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY Id) AS RowNumber     FROM         MyTable ) SELECT     Id,     Value FROM     NumberedMyTable WHERE     RowNumber BETWEEN @From AND @To