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

Question

I\'m interested in learning some (ideally) database agnostic ways of selecting the nth row from a database table. It would also be interesting to see how this can b

Answer 1

I'm a bit late to the party here but I have done this without the need for windowing or using

WHERE x IN (...)

SELECT TOP 1
--select the value needed from in t1
[col2]
FROM
(
   SELECT TOP 2 --the Nth row, alter this to taste
   UE2.[col1],
   UE2.[col2],
   UE2.[date],
   UE2.[time],
   UE2.[UID]
   FROM
   [table1] AS UE2
   WHERE
   UE2.[col1] = ID --this is a subquery 
   AND
   UE2.[col2] IS NOT NULL
   ORDER BY
   UE2.[date] DESC, UE2.[time] DESC --sorting by date and time newest first
) AS t1
ORDER BY t1.[date] ASC, t1.[time] ASC --this reverses the order of the sort in t1

It seems to work fairly fast although to be fair I only have around 500 rows of data

This works in MSSQL

Answer 2

Here is a fast solution of your confusion.

SELECT * FROM table ORDER BY `id` DESC LIMIT N, 1

Here You may get Last row by Filling N=0, Second last by N=1, Fourth Last By Filling N=3 and so on.

This is very common question over the interview and this is Very simple ans of it.

Further If you want Amount, ID or some Numeric Sorting Order than u may go for CAST function in MySQL.

SELECT DISTINCT (`amount`) FROM cart ORDER BY CAST( `amount` AS SIGNED ) DESC LIMIT 4 , 1

Here By filling N = 4 You will be able to get Fifth Last Record of Highest Amount from CART table. You can fit your field and table name and come up with solution.

Answer 3

unbelievable that you can find a SQL engine executing this one ...

WITH sentence AS
(SELECT 
    stuff,
    row = ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY Id)
FROM 
    SentenceType
    )
SELECT
    sen.stuff
FROM sentence sen
WHERE sen.row = (ABS(CHECKSUM(NEWID())) % 100) + 1

Answer 4

LIMIT n,1 doesn't work in MS SQL Server. I think it's just about the only major database that doesn't support that syntax. To be fair, it isn't part of the SQL standard, although it is so widely supported that it should be. In everything except SQL server LIMIT works great. For SQL server, I haven't been able to find an elegant solution.

Answer 5

SELECT
    top 1 *
FROM
    table_name
WHERE
    column_name IN (
        SELECT
            top N column_name
        FROM
            TABLE
        ORDER BY
            column_name
    )
ORDER BY
    column_name DESC

I've written this query for finding Nth row. Example with this query would be

SELECT
    top 1 *
FROM
    Employee
WHERE
    emp_id IN (
        SELECT
            top 7 emp_id
        FROM
            Employee
        ORDER BY
            emp_id
    )
ORDER BY
    emp_id DESC

Answer 6

In Oracle 12c, You may use OFFSET..FETCH..ROWS option with ORDER BY

For example, to get the 3rd record from top:

SELECT * 
FROM   sometable
ORDER BY column_name
OFFSET 2 ROWS FETCH NEXT 1 ROWS ONLY;