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 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 regarding the SQL standard. Troels, have you got any links we can cite?

Solution 1

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.

Solution 2

PostgreSQL supports windowing functions as defined by the SQL standard, but they're awkward, so most people use (the non-standard) LIMIT / OFFSET:

SELECT
    *
FROM
    mytable
ORDER BY
    somefield
LIMIT 1 OFFSET 20;

This example selects the 21st row. OFFSET 20 is telling Postgres to skip the first 20 records. If you don't specify an ORDER BY clause, there's no guarantee which record you will get back, which is rarely useful.

Solution 3

I'm not sure about any of the rest, but I know SQLite and MySQL don't have any "default" row ordering. In those two dialects, at least, the following snippet grabs the 15th entry from the_table, sorting by the date/time it was added:

SELECT * 
FROM the_table 
ORDER BY added DESC 
LIMIT 1,15

(of course, you'd need to have an added DATETIME field, and set it to the date/time that entry was added...)

Solution 4

SQL 2005 and above has this feature built-in. Use the ROW_NUMBER() function. It is excellent for web-pages with a << Prev and Next >> style browsing:

Syntax:

SELECT
    *
FROM
    (
        SELECT
            ROW_NUMBER () OVER (ORDER BY MyColumnToOrderBy) AS RowNum,
            *
        FROM
            Table_1
    ) sub
WHERE
    RowNum = 23

Solution 5

I suspect this is wildly inefficient but is quite a simple approach, which worked on a small dataset that I tried it on.

select top 1 field
from table
where field in (select top 5 field from table order by field asc)
order by field desc

This would get the 5th item, change the second top number to get a different nth item

SQL server only (I think) but should work on older versions that do not support ROW_NUMBER().

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