While LINQ-to-SQL will generate an OFFSET
clause (possibly emulated using ROW_NUMBER() OVER()
as others have mentioned), there is an entirely different, much faster way to perform paging in SQL. This is often called the "seek method" as described in this blog post here.
SELECT TOP 10 first_name, last_name, score
FROM players
WHERE (score < @previousScore)
OR (score = @previousScore AND player_id < @previousPlayerId)
ORDER BY score DESC, player_id DESC
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 paging when lazy loading more data in web applications, for instance.
Note, the "seek method" is also called keyset paging.