How to select the nth row in a SQL database table?

ghz 1years ago ⋅ 951 views

Question

I'm interested in learning some (ideally) database agnostic ways of selecting the n th 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](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16568/how-to-select-the-nth-row- in-a-sql-database-table#42765) regarding the SQL standard. Troels, have you got any links we can cite?

Answer

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.

#oracle