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

For the ROW_NUMBER technique, if you do not have a sorting column to use, you can use the CURRENT_TIMESTAMP as follows:

SELECT TOP 20 
    col1,
    col2,
    col3,
    col4
FROM (
    SELECT 
         tbl.col1 AS col1
        ,tbl.col2 AS col2
        ,tbl.col3 AS col3
        ,tbl.col4 AS col4
        ,ROW_NUMBER() OVER (
            ORDER BY CURRENT_TIMESTAMP
            ) AS sort_row
    FROM dbo.MyTable tbl
    ) AS query
WHERE query.sort_row > 10
ORDER BY query.sort_row

This has worked well for me for searches over table sizes of even up to 700,000.

This fetches records 11 to 30.