Thank you, everyone, for the eye-opening research. You guys have contributed some caveats to consider when trying to identify the best solution.

Steve's lead-in was a bit misleading in that I do not consider the 'holy grail' method to be "the best" in all cases (although it remains the best in cases that I've had to work with). I was defining the 'holy grail' as being able to get the count and the page without adding a bunch of I/O overhead.

Every time I've needed to implement server-side paging, the code would be paging the results of a query, sometimes simple, sometimes complex. As a result Jeff's 'no join' methods are out the window, which is a shame because that's a very cool trick! In the edge cases, these queries would page tens of thousands of records (nowhere near the 1-2 million record test cases we've seen on this thread, although I should have done tests like that for this article)

I started looking for a better approach to getting a count because the underlying query that had to be returned to the user was very complex and expensive. Doing the 'embedded two-bite' method or others add considerable cost and time to execute the query.

For my ends, the 'holy grail' approach is absolutely the fastest and most efficient technique and I am convinced that there are other people out there who can benefit from this technique (which is why I wrote the article) Will this approach be the best in all cases? No

There is definitely a lot of good feedback and information in this thread. I'll update the article with the information you shared.