What is the best way to paginate results in SQL Server

Question

What is the best way (performance wise) to paginate results in SQL Server 2000, 2005, 2008, 2012 if you also want to get the total number of results (before paginating)?

Answer 1

Incredibly, no other answer has mentioned the fastest way to do pagination in all SQL Server versions. Offsets can be terribly slow for large page numbers as is benchmarked here. There is an entirely different, much faster way to perform pagination in SQL. This is often called the "seek method" or "keyset pagination" as described in this blog post here.

SELECT TOP 10 first_name, last_name, score, COUNT(*) OVER()
FROM players
WHERE (score < @previousScore)
   OR (score = @previousScore AND player_id < @previousPlayerId)
ORDER BY score DESC, player_id DESC

The "seek predicate"

The @previousScore and @previousPlayerId values are the respective values of the last record from the previous page. This allows you to fetch the "next" page. If the ORDER BY direction is ASC, simply use > instead.

With the above method, you cannot immediately jump to page 4 without having first fetched the previous 40 records. But often, you do not want to jump that far anyway. Instead, you get a much faster query that might be able to fetch data in constant time, depending on your indexing. Plus, your pages remain "stable", no matter if the underlying data changes (e.g. on page 1, while you're on page 4).

This is the best way to implement pagination when lazy loading more data in web applications, for instance.

Note, the "seek method" is also called keyset pagination.

Total records before pagination

The COUNT(*) OVER() window function will help you count the number of total records "before pagination". If you're using SQL Server 2000, you will have to resort to two queries for the COUNT(*).