FreeTDS Development Group

[David Barnwell <david.barnwell AT well.ox.ac.uk>]

You can page through MSSQL tables 20 rows at a time using this SQL:

   SELECT top 20 author, title, description FROM mytable
   WHERE table_id NOT IN (
      select top 12345 table_id from mytable
      order by title
   )
   ORDER BY title

Here, table_id = primary key of the table
12345 = the next row to return (counting from 0)

I wrote a data browser that allows the user to page through any table 
and see the first/next/last 20 rows. It's surprisingly fast - on a table 
with 344000 rows it can select the last 20 rows in about a second.

-- David

Navdeep Shergill wrote:
> I am trying to implement a mysql like paging; and this is one approach that
> I am looking at. Mysql makes it realy easy with the LIMIT keyword; but I am
> not having such luck with MSSQL. I am currently looking at the ROW_NUMBER
> function ; but even that one requires me to do a order by on some column.
>
> The problem is that the user may be trying to run some very generic queries;
> and I need to be able to provide paging.. so I was looking at some way to
> exec a query; and then go right to some arbitary row in the result set.