SwePeso (12/6/2010)
It seems the dual TOP/ORDER BY was the most efficient approach by the time.I tested the new Denali OFFSET/FETCH and I got the exact same number of reads for @StartRow = 5000, but 2 ms instead of 4 ms.
SELECTNumber
FROMdbo.TallyNumbers
ORDER BYNumber
OFFSET@StartRow - 1 ROWS
FETCH NEXT50 ROWS ONLY
My take on the Denali paging....
http://sqlblogcasts.com/blogs/sqlandthelike/archive/2010/11/10/denali-paging-is-it-win-win.aspx
and
http://sqlblogcasts.com/blogs/sqlandthelike/archive/2010/11/19/denali-paging-key-seek-lookups.aspx