Good article, although every server based pagination sample I read seems to skip the fact that in almost every situation the "user" wants to know how many records there are in total, including any specified filters. This allows any client side paging mechanism to say "you're on page 3 of 15" etc.

Is there any way to do this without using a temp table/variable as this seems to be a much less elegant solution than the ROW_NUMBER paging shown here ?